Winter 2018: Under the Covers

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

PORNOGRAPHY AND PREJUDICE

OFF THE CLOCK

WHERE ACTIVISM FAILS

VOLUME XLIX NO. 4, WINTER 2018 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

UNDE R COVE THE RS

WINTER 2018 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

RED LINE HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/REDLINE

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This issue’s cover topic was originally proposed by Savitri Fouda & Katie Weiner.

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Pornography & Prejudice Trina Lilja

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Off the Clock Ryan Chung

CAMPUS

10 Where Activism Fails Gordon Kamer

CULTURE

13 Harvard, Inc. Mimi Alphonsus

36 InstaHealth Joseph Winters

15 A Desert in Cambridge Nina Elkadi

39 Migration Memorialized: The Art of the Refugee Crisis Katie Weiner

UNITED STATES 17 Red and Blue Robes Clay Oxford 20 Attack Dogs Ilana Cohen 23 Beyond the Classroom Will Boggs

20 Attack Dogs Ilana Cohen

10 Where Activism Fails Gordon Kamer

26 Security in a Digital World Roger Cawdette 29 Don’t Take My Guns Hannah Fontaine

WORLD

42 Reclaiming Culture: Jordan’s Young Artists Wyatt Hurt

INTERVIEWS 45 President Juan Carlos Varela Rodríguez Russell Reed 46 On the Radical Center: Mitch Landrieu Bridger Gordon

ENDPAPER 48 Seeing Red: Loving Uncertainty Ari Berman

31 Many Islands, One Big Problem Kendrick Foster

39 Migration Memorialized Katie Weiner

34 Nord Stream II: Russia’s Geopolitical Trap Pawel Rybacki

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: Artist: 1,40- Mohamad Hafez and Ahmed Badr (Nelson Imaging); 39- Studio Candice Breitz; 42- Laila Ajjawi. Photographer: 23- Vermont Mountain School; 24- Petty Officer 2nd Class Cynthia Oldham; 46- Harvard Political Review. Flickr: 19- Mobilus in Mobili; 46- JD Lasica; 48- Tim Sackton. Pixabay: 1Olichel. Unsplash: 1- Justine Camacho; 1,10- Gift Habeshaw; 6- Jez Timms; 8- Adam Wilson; 15- Fancycrave; 20- Colter Olmstead; 26- Peter Pivak; 28- Jonny Caspari; 29- David Leveque; 31- Cris Tagupa; 34- Zbynek Burival; 36- rawpixel. Wikimedia Commons: 13- Daderot, 17- Wikimedia. Designer: 3,4,5- Trina Lilja. Design by: Eliot Harrison, Trina Lilja, Erica Newman-Corre, Kendall Rideout, and Matthew Rossi.

WINTER 2018 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

Under the Covers

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLV, No. 4

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: Will Imbrie-Moore INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Martin 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: Jason Huang ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Estefania Lahera 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, Rob Capodilupo, 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 FrenkelPopell, 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, Jake McIntyre, Carter Nakamoto, Nikole Naloy, Lainey Newman, Allison Piper, Mfundo Radebe, Noah Redlich, Sebastian Reyes, 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 SENIOR WRITERS: Perry Abdulkadir, Chad Borgman, Henry Brooks, Beverly Brown, Derek Paulhus, Akash Wasil, Andrew Zucker

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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P

olitics isn’t sexy, yet sex and politics attract like magnets. Usually, this marriage is driven by scandal and sensationalism. When the Harvard Political Review last published an issue focusing on sex, it was during the culture wars of the early aughts — when sexually-charged rap lyrics and explicit video games were prime fodder for members of Congress railing against moral indecency. The HPR’s president at the time, John H. Jernigan, kicked off the summer 2004 issue, “The Politics of Sex,” by registering his disappointment in the broader media’s coverage of sex. He noted that the HPR’s goal would be to “contribute to a frank conversation of the politics of sex that is both mature and, if admittedly controversial, at least analytically objective.”

For this issue of the HPR, we explore a broad set of themes surrounding sex, sexuality, and gender, and their implications for contemporary politics and culture.

While our goal is the same as the one Mr. Jernigan laid out 15 years ago, the political climate today is very different than that of 2004. Looking back, the moral decency conversations from that time seem prudish at worst, and unproductive at best — today’s lyrics are no cleaner, and video games have only become more realistic. In the meantime, an increasingly nuanced conversation surrounding sexual assault and power dynamics has taken hold.

A year after the start of the #MeToo movement, women and men in the United States and beyond continue to rally against workplace misconduct and sexual abuse.

The conversation surrounding #MeToo began at the highest levels of media and entertainment, but it has cut across industries and socioeconomic levels. Just last month, Google employees around the world staged a walkout in critique of the company’s mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations.

To be sure, ideological debates intersecting with sex have by no means disappeared. Abortion remains as controversial an issue as ever, with pro-lifers hoping that a more conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. The debate around campus sexual assault also rages on, with

both critics and supporters of Title IX loudly voicing their opinions. It is difficult to say why the conversation around sex seems more substantive today than in past years. But one thing is for sure — today’s conversation on sex goes beyond questions of morality and liberation and extends to the myriad ways sex intersects with politics and livelihoods.

In this issue of the HPR, we illuminate some of the ways in which these conversations are changing industries, flipping power dynamics, and revolutionizing the ways in which we think and talk about sex. In “Off the Clock,” Ryan Chung explores how workplaces can take action to empower women. In “Pornography and Prejudice,” Trina Lilja discusses what porn consumption data can tell us about our society. And in “Where Activism Fails: The Resilience of Gay Sadness,” Gordon Kamer paints a frank portrait of the difficulties of gay life and their impact on mental health.

As the tenure of the HPR’s 50th masthead comes to a close, I would like to thank our editors and writers for working so hard to produce this year’s articles.

I would also like to thank our publishing staff for working tirelessly to beautify our content and expand its reach. I am proud of all that we have accomplished in just a short while, and I cannot wait to see how the HPR continues to flourish under new leadership. For our readers, I hope you have found the articles enclosed within, and the rest of this year’s content, as fresh, insightful, and engaging as ever. As always, thank you for reading.

Samuel Kessler President

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EXAMPLE ARTICLE

PORNOGRAPHY & PREJUDICE Trina Lilja

I

n October 2009, Parliament member David Bahati vocalized Uganda’s long history of homophobia by proposing a bill that imposed the death penalty as punishment for anyone engaging in same-sex relations. Bahati introduced the bill, which was signed by the president and passed into law in 2013, in an attempt to “protect the cherished culture of the people of Uganda.”

Although the bill was amended and eventually voided for procedural reasons, a 2013 Pew Research poll showed that 96 percent of Ugandans continued to believe that society should not accept homosexuality. Ever since it gained political independence from Britain in 1962, Uganda has consistently ranked among the world’s most homophobic nations.

So whyis Uganda ranked third in internet searches for homosexual pornography? After Kenya and Pakistan, two countries that have also outlawed homosexuality, Uganda boasts the highest number of Google searches containing the phrase “man fucking man.”

Statistics do not lie. Uganda is one of the most homophobic nations in the world, but also one of the countries where gay porn is most popular. How does one even begin to understand the way that these two facts connect? Surprisingly, this is not a rare combination. It actually demonstrates a social phenomenon first identified by Sigmund Freud called reaction formation.

Because of the way in which it mirrors cultural attitudes, pornography reveals two important causal relationships between social phenomena. Not only does it show how reaction formation can lead to increasing homophobia, it also shows how racism can involve the sexualization of targets of hate.

PORNOGRAPHY AND REACTION FORMATION Reaction formation is best understood as a psychoanalytic defense mechanism. Freud explained that people often have the most negative attitudes towards things that they secretly crave, but feel that they should not get to have. When it comes to nations such as Uganda and its citizens, this means that homosexual desires, when repressed by societal climates of shame or fear, become internalized homophobia.

“Internalized homophobia is incorporating anti-gay attitudes into oneself … because we live in the society we live in where we are surrounded by anti-gay attitudes, we can take those on ourselves … and come to hate a part of oneself,” Nicole Legate, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, explained to the HPR. Legate was involved with a study years ago that examined internalized homophobia in people who identify as heterosexual. “People you know who reported being straight, but actually showed a bit

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MOST POPULAR PORNOGRAPHY CATEGORIES

TEEN LESBIAN of attraction to same-sex individuals … tended to be more homophobic as well in their attitudes.”

While Uganda reveals to us the hidden psychological processes happening behind the outward views, reaction formation is not isolated to places like Uganda. Through the years there have been many examples of similar issues in the United States, with revelations that many American political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights have actually been involved in same-sex relationships — Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and Glenn Murphy Jr., to name a few. Similar to the situation in Uganda, these individuals’ stories demonstrate the havoc that the pressure of social and political homophobia can wreak on an individual.

While it is true that not all homophobic individuals have repressed homosexual desires, in the cases where oppression by society is strong, the pressure that individuals put on themselves can become stronger. This can often lead to the unbelievable hatred and vehemence some individuals have after enduring their own self-hatred for so long.

Legate told the HPR that internalized homophobia is “this really toxic thing that can develop in people and really the damage is to themselves, in terms of feeling lots of shame, and it is linked with all kind of negative health outcomes and risky behaviors that they are more likely to engage in.”

Pornography, particularly the popularity of certain types of pornography, has shown that reaction formation is a selfperpetuating problem. The aggressive homophobia that causes the reaction formation also leads to a society that labels certain actions or desires as “forbidden.” However, this does not stop people from having their internal preferences, and living in an environment where their desires are looked down upon leads to further internalized homophobia, which is then expressed outwardly as aggression. Societies with outwardly homophobic cultures lead people to gratify their forbidden desires in secret.

LESBIAN PORN: YOU LOVE IT OR HATE IT Pornography statistics can help shed light on those desires forced into hiding by societal pressure. Where better to look for a clear and well-documented database of the preferences people have that they often feel too ashamed to share in public than the popular pornography website PornHub? The most recent PornHub Year in Review, an annual compilation of all of the site’s viewing data from the previous year, revealed that “lesbian” is the most popular category on the site. While women on PornHub who identify as lesbian no doubt search within this category, a large portion of viewership actually belongs to males, as “lesbian” is in the top five categories for men worldwide. In the United States alone, “lesbian” is the most popular category in 31 states, including Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina.

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EBONY

These same states, however, still discriminate against lesbian people in the real world. While woman-focused same-sex acts have always played a role in the hidden fantasies of men, when it comes to actual people who identify as lesbian, many people in the above mentioned states are far less accepting. 15 years ago, “homosexual conduct” was illegal in Texas. Alabama remains the only state in the United States where the majority of its citizens are opposed to same-sex marriage. South Carolina, Texas, and Alabama are all states with “no promo homo” laws, where teachers are forbidden from teaching gay and transgender issues in schools.

While commenting on internalized homophobia, professor Richard Ryan at Australian Catholic University told the HPR that it exacts a massive cost on the LGBT community: “The burial of Matthew Shepard [an American student who was beaten, tortured, and eventually left to die because of his sexual orientation] is a reminder of how severe that cost can be … we can detect these health costs of non-acceptance, stigma and prejudice in our society.”

When it comes to communities like the ones within these states, being homophobic and turning the different into something “forbidden” only creates a cycle of people with internal dilemmas. The temptation of the forbidden that is commercialized through porn has led to the situation we are in today, where people and their identities are sexualized, but still fail to be accepted in society and the world of politics.

SEX AND RACISM Another interesting PornHub statistic reveals the ways in which sexualization can also go hand in hand with racism. For the second year in a row, the second most popular category on PornHub after “lesbian” is “ebony.” The category “ebony” refers to pornography films that star at least one person of African descent. Curiously, every state with “ebony” in its top three search terms is also a state that had anti-miscegenation laws until Loving v. Virginia legalized mixed-race marriages in 1967. In three states — Delaware, Georgia and Mississippi — the search term “ebony” is the most popular, beyond even lesbian porn.

Moreover, while “ebony” is the most popular search term in

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HISTORIC HOMOPHOBIA AND RACISM

Had banned same-sex marriage until Obergefell v. Hodges Had both banned same-sex marriage and was a slave state Was a slave state until freed by law

only these three states, “ebony” as a complete category domiCreated

by Atterratio Aeternus nates the entire southeast.

Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Missisfrom the Noun Project sippi, Louisiana, and Florida are all states in which the “ebony” porn category is the most popular.

Let us consider these states further. Delaware was a slave state prior to the Civil War; Georgia refused to integrate public schools until the U.S. Department of Justice forced it to in 1969; and Mississippi’s flag is the only U.S. state flag to still include the Confederate battle flag’s saltire. These states, and the others with “ebony” in the top three categories, do not seem like the friendliest places towards interracial porn based upon their civil rights records.

However, that is precisely the reason why “ebony” porn is so popular. In these states, it has long been seen as a societal taboo for white people to be attracted to people who do not look the same as them. Porn is designed to sexualize the boundaries in our lives that we are frightened to cross, and the porn industry profits off of this by playing on our desire for the “forbidden.”

Racism creates an environment in which a person of one race views anyone different from them as somehow being “lesser” than them, which allows for more rampant sexualization of that group of people. People are willing to sexualize black bodies, but continue to look down upon black human beings. This sexualization only encourages continued racism: It is easy to see someone as less than you when you also consider them more depraved.

Jennifer Johnson, associate professor and chair of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in the modern markets of pornography, told the HPR that “any form of commerce will use culture and social structures and social norms to craft a marketing message, and pornography uses racism, sexism, and misogyny to market its products — they are tools of the online pornography economy.” While Johnson does not agree that taboo plays a large role — she explains that the language of racism and misogyny exists because that is what viewers want; that is what they pay for.

Porn does not cause racism. Discrimination and cruelty have existed far longer than even porn magazines have existed.

In recent decades, however, adult videos and magazines have

tackled the taboo and forbidden in search of profit. The fact that these images are popular and sexually stimulating to people indicates an alarming sexualization of these very serious issues.

In the end, the sexualization of black bodies is just another form of racism.

POLITICS AND PORN, THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE Is the Trump administration encouraging an interest in racist porn? It is a bold claim to make. Lexington Steele, once stockbroker, now three-time Adult Video News Male Performer of the Year, shared in an interview with The Daily Beast that while there may be more tension under the Trump administration, it reveals racial themes that have existed for much longer; only now, people are noticing.

2016 was the year that Donald Trump gained national attention through his campaign for the presidency, and as Steele has said, “Porn often reflects society.” In PornHub’s data for 2016, Donald Trump was the fourth most popular celebrity searched for in porn. Moreover, while thousands were at rallies chanting “Build a Wall” and “Keep Them Out,” in reference to Mexican immigrants, the term “big booty latina” became more searched for in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The second and third most searched terms relative to the rest of the world were “big black dick” and “ebony,” respectively.

As discussed earlier, it seems many in the United States are content to overtly sexualize the targets of their discrimination. The political issues brought to the front by then-candidate Trump simply revealed racism that had been there the entire time. Moving into 2017, according to PornHub’s data, the top two most viewed categories in the United States as compared to the rest of the world remained “ebony” and “latina.”

As Johnson said, “That pornography use, particularly heavy pornography use to me is like the canary in a coal mine, that it should be used as an indicator that there is a problem going on with that person, now whether the pornography is causing it, or whether the pornography is just reflecting it, I don’t know if we will ever be able to figure that out.”

Overall, despite the popularity of same-sex and “ebony” porn, large portions of our society remain just as discriminatory as in decades past. A close examination of pornography viewing, through the lens of PornHub data, reveals that, while seemingly contradictory at first glance, the link between prejudice, bias, and porn is evident. Homophobia appears to go hand in hand with an affinity for gay porn, and racism is emboldened by sexualization through porn. If porn is a reflection of cultural attitudes, then we have a ways to go towards creating a society where people of minority racial backgrounds and sexual identities are treated equally. n

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OFF THE CLOCK 6 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2018

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Ryan Chung

W

ith overwhelming emphasis placed on gender equality in the workplace, equality after working hours is often neglected or forgotten. For career-minded women, workplace discrimination has been a challenge since they entered the workforce after the Civil War and again after World War II. Today there is more a culture of speaking out against discrimination, as exemplified by the #MeToo movement; however, it is much more difficult to combat discrimination when it is implicit or not readily apparent. Many women who wish to follow their career goals are faced with the persistent challenge of navigating social spaces geared to men, such as the golf course or at the bar.

This hyper-masculine culture that is almost necessary to further a career, especially in the tech industry, leaves women vulnerable to unwelcome situations. The implicit discrimination that is perpetuated through after-work social activities in today’s corporate climate must be targeted and eliminated to create more workplace diversity and to allow women to reach their full potential in the workforce. Beyond the traditional concerns of equal pay, equal hours, and equal benefits, after work activities make it nearly impossible for men and women to be on equal footing.

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EXPLAINING THE CULTURE For women in tech, being “one of the boys” is no new phenomenon. Historically, much of the corporate culture that we see today was founded on the principles of a traditional nuclear family with a breadwinner husband and a housewife. Although modern American values have evolved, organizational culture, or the values that form the “unique social and psychological environment of an organization,” have not followed suit. Women today are afforded many more opportunities in the workforce, but the culture of after-work hours often rolls back that progress.

In the traditional sense, maternal responsibilities are ones that men are often not associated with, which creates a divide between genders. Working mothers are often tasked with the responsibility of taking care of their children and face both implicit and explicit expectations to be home right after normal working hours, while their husbands are free to socialize and stay out with their coworkers. It is this implicit and rather obvious bias that has driven social and gender dynamics in the wrong direction.

While at face value this does not seem to be detrimental to women’s success in the corporate world, it restricts their ability to form important professional relationships. For example, a woman declining an offer to go out after work could lead to the assumption that she is not a team player, when in reality she is expected to be home taking care of the household and children.

These situations can quickly become alienating for working women. Going out to a bar for happy hour is difficult for those who do not drink as much as their coworkers, and this already uncomfortable atmosphere can only exacerbate gender-related discomforts. In such scenarios, some women are unable to participate and act as “one of the boys,” hence rendering them unable to build rapport and make connections with other “bros” who are part of the culture.

Hypermasculine culture has, unsurprisingly, a particularly strong foothold in the tech industry. Most tech employees are white cisgender men, who often unconsciously or consciously perpetuate the preferential hiring of people like themselves.

Recently, companies such as Tesla and Uber have come under fire for pervasive harassment. This harassment ranges from having ideas or proposals ignored or even from the lack of peers

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or superiors who have had the same experiences in life and the workforce. When gender diversity in hiring is not made a priority, the vicious cycle of men hiring more men is perpetuated, leaving most qualified women unhired. As a result, those who do make it into the workforce are isolated, vulnerable, and subject to discrimination.

CALLING FOR TECH SUPPORT What impact does this culture have on the workplace? Primarily, it decreases gender diversity during off-hours. Because men are more likely to be able to participate in the informal social experiences that build and solidify bonds with coworkers and superiors, they are more likely to be seen in a positive light.

This positive feedback loop unintentionally serves to promote the hiring of more men than women. This makes the process of after-work activities a zero-sum game. Diversity has been proven to drive economic growth because drawing from a more diverse pool allows for a more qualified workforce. Furthermore, strong corporate culture allows for purpose and learning-oriented organizational development, which is also intrinsic to economic development. This benefits women and, ultimately, the corporation as a whole.

The tech industry has been slowly changing its culture and making progress against blatant discrimination. Uber is one example of a company that is taking measures to support highpotential women. Emilie Gerber, Corporate Communications Officer at Uber, told the HPR that the company recently launched a sponsorship program to help women break the glass ceiling.

She stated, “As people move further into their career, it’s not just about networking or mentoring, but really having a leader who will advocate for you and for developmental opportunities and new responsibilities.”

However, advocates for women’s representation have shown that there is still much ground to be covered when it comes to fighting implicit discrimination. Judy Zhu, Chief Operating Officer of The Leadership Consortium, a group that focuses on accelerating leadership and promoting diversity, is one such advocate. In an interview with the HPR, she shared that genderneutral after-work activities and locations are essential to building strong relationships within a corporate community. Zhu also emphasized the benefits to a community of doing something

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altruistic together. She stated that this “boosts morale and connectivity and is vastly beneficial to society, not just colleagues.”

Participating in such an activity allows for a psychological boost that ultimately improves working conditions overall.

Echoing that same sentiment, Kathy Caprino, founder of Ellia Communications, a career consulting firm aimed at helping women further their careers, stated in an interview with the HPR: “All levels must meet together. Whether it be coffee, dinner, or drinks, companies must vet activities from both sides [men and women].” According to Caprino, both sides must be given the opportunity to voice their opinions on the parity of suggested activities. Another potential solution that Gerber said Uber was implementing is allowing for more events to take place during working hours. Gerber said that recognizing that workers, particularly women, have potential conflicts with after-work activities is a crucial step to equality in the workplace.

If tech companies are to continue to innovate, they must see that there is much to gain from innovation in organizational culture, particularly in outside-of-work activities. With research showing that diversity and inclusivity improve workforce decision-making and performance, there are grounds for calling for progress in and out of the workplace. While many companies have strived to do so during working hours through equal pay initiatives and somewhat equal access to higher positions — although there is a glass ceiling that still persists for many women — it is difficult to find the same level of development in afterhours activities. As top-tier corporations such as Uber begin to develop unique ways to tap into the potential of all workers during such activities, there is hope for a trickle-down effect in which smaller businesses adopt these policies and build upon them to create an even more equal working environment.

KICKSTARTING SOLUTIONS While these solutions seem easy to implement, they can only go so far. There must be more comprehensive social change in the workplace in order to yield real, long-term effects. One imperative is removing the deep-seated biases which result, as Caprino asserted, from the brain’s propensity to filter out things by finding patterns. Pattern-based thinking predisposes individuals towards certain biases because others unlike them do not fall under the same paradigm; the others are thus deemed

different and, unfortunately, lesser. Both Caprino and Zhu echoed one another in their emphasis on education and awareness. “Awareness is key,” Caprino stated. “You have to make what is unconscious, conscious.” Through training and education on both sides, employers will realize that they are in fact biased, which is integral to equal hiring practices and general equality in the workplace. Gerber furthered this idea by emphasizing the need for “clear and transparent conversation” that is conducted in a “non-pejorative way.” If the conversation revolves around words such as “bro culture,” she said, people will be put on the defensive and will not engage in conversation. Gerber also underscored the fact that hypermasculinity does not only hurt women, but also hurts men who do not identify with heteronormative, binary norms. A shift in culture helps everyone, which further shows the importance of productive and constructive conversations about gender parity.

The importance of improving hiring practices was another key element highlighted by Zhu and Caprino. Zhu remarked that “no activity, whether within or outside of working hours, can replace actual representation.” The right set of metrics, she said, “allows the right possibilities to be brought to the table, and this allows each role to be filled with proper representation.”

Caprino, however, took a more radical view, asserting that if the “knee-jerk reaction is to hire men, we must go the other way until numbers become more equal, until we see women in these roles.” This proactive policy in the workforce would control discrimination and prevent it from negatively impacting women.

Behaviors and values outside of normal working hours are just as important as those within the confines of the workplace.

While they may not constitute harassment, after-work activities perpetuate discrimination against women, particularly because of timing and location. There must be a greater effort to create spaces in which all people can be welcomed, and more conscious evaluation to provide equal footing for all employees. A workplace that is more equal in this sense will lend itself to a more humanistic culture, in which relationships between coworkers and between employees and employers will flourish. With an improved foundation, organizations will be able to grow immeasurably, making employees and employers alike more happy and successful in their endeavors. As a society, we must go out of our way to make this difficult shift, which will ultimately be rewarding and beneficial for the global workforce as a whole. n

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WHERE ACTIVISM FAILS THE RESILIENCE OF GAY SADNESS

Gordon Kamer

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W

hat I remember most from coming out to my parents was the morning after. My dad walked into my room at about 7:00 am, shook me awake, and decided to tell me what he was thinking.

“The path that you’re going down is a life of disease and depression.”

I rubbed my eyes while trying to wake up.

“I know, because I’m a doctor,” he continued.

If you are a parent reading this, I would recommend not saying this to your son if he ever comes out to you. But before I inspire any pity, let me say that things with my parents got better rather quickly, and I came out of the experience mostly unscathed. However, my dad’s comment has stuck with me, not because it haunts me, but because I think it is an intellectually interesting question. Surely, I thought, if my dad saw gay life as one of “disease and depression,” it was because he went to medical school during the AIDS epidemic — or, perhaps, the discrimination he saw during his lifetime did make it a worse life. Surely, I thought, things are and would continue to get much better for gay people.

But the more I thought about what my dad had said and the more I researched it, the more begrudgingly I came to understand where he was coming from, even if I did not agree with his sweeping generalization. LGBT people are more likely to commit suicide than straight people. They are also more likely to have cardiovascular disease, cancer, incontinence, asthma, erectile dysfunction, and more. I thought that, perhaps if only gay rights kept progressing, these numbers would go away. However, in Sweden, where gay civil unions and gay marriage have been legal since 1995 and 2009, respectively, men married to men are still three times more likely to kill themselves than men married to women.

That being said, laws concerning gay rights do impact gay health. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that visits to medical care facilities and mental health spending both decreased by a statistically significant amount following the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling in Goodridge v Dept. of Public Health that legalized same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth. However, legal activism intended to improve gay health by securing gay rights can only achieve so much. We must recognize that, in the well-being of gay men, external factors do not play as large a role as structural factors — factors which are not influenced by legislation, and oftentimes are not even necessarily linked to societal tolerance.

MINORITY STRESS Among the most sinister and difficult to eliminate influencers of gay sadness is minority stress. “Minority stress” is the

term researchers have given to the excess stress members of stigmatized minorities feel above members of majority groups.

Minority stress is said to be principally caused by prejudice and discrimination. One of the more invisible parts of minority stress is that it does not only occur when someone calls a gay person a name in the hallway or when someone bullies someone; it is chronic. Dr. Ilan Meyer, an expert at the Williams Institute, a UCLA think-tank focusing on the impact of policy on gay wellbeing, explained this to the HPR. He described the phenomenon of “rumination,” by which gay people focus and worry about how they are perceived by others, even when they do not know if the others they are dealing with harbor any anti-gay attitudes whatsoever. Meyer explained: “Let’s say you’re going to a job interview. It’s harder for you to perform when you have to worry about how you’re perceived or if the person interviewing you has homophobic attitudes. You have to monitor your behavior.”

The mere possibility of others’ intolerance can mimic the impact of actual intolerance. When there is that chance, gay people are on alert. Therefore, stress does not necessarily decrease one-toone with increased tolerance, and it may continue to be significant even as tolerance becomes more common.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF DATING What makes a minority a minority, by definition, is that it is small. Being a sexual minority has the added difficulty that sex is a multiplayer game. If straight dating is difficult, then gay dating is made harder by pure numbers; if there are fewer potential matches, fewer matches are made. If a straight person can say, “there are plenty of fish in the sea” after a breakup, a gay person’s sea is more like a pond. In an interview with the HPR, Bryce Gilfillian ’12, an admissions officer and member of the gay community at Harvard, remembered from his days as an undergraduate that “there was very little dating in the gay community at Harvard.” Gilfillian did not only say that this observation was true in general but was also true in his social sphere, which revolved around theater, one of the more highly gay-concentrated communities.

Gilfillian added, “It’s hard to find because it’s invisible.”

While some may have a better “gaydar” — ability to detect other gay people — than others, there is simply no secret sign that will definitively determine if someone is gay. When the guy you like in history class is almost certainly straight, the courting process is far more depressing. In other words, gay people find more rejection and cannot always tailor their courtship only to other gay people. In addition, as the probability that the target of a romantic conquest reciprocates attraction decreases, so does the desire to even participate in the process. Not only are there fewer matches for gay people, they also miss out on proportionally

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UNDER THE COVERS

more matches than straight people. Dating is an important part of life; polls asking what people want most find that love is at or near the top. After all, the presence of love interests are ubiquitous in all genres of movies, and we find attractive actors and actresses to play them. If gay people have a harder time finding love than straight people, they will naturally be less happy.

GAY HOOK-UP CULTURE AND APPS Solutions intended to combat the difficulties of gay dating do exist. Recent years have seen a surge in the number of gay men using dating apps like Tinder or Grindr. An article on Mashable sums up the benefits of apps in its title, “Here are the best dating apps, since meeting people [in real life] is hell.” Gilfillian explained that gay dating apps “remove all of the straight people.”

They also serve to facilitate longer distance interactions, hence increasing the potential dating pool.

For all of the solutions that these apps provide, however, they create at least as many problems. For example, unlike Tinder, Grindr allows users to message others in the same vicinity even if both partners have not demonstrated a mutual interest.

The result is that receiving unsolicited or hurtful messages is commonplace for many users . I remember my concern when a friend of mine once showed me some messages he received: “Hark! I am available to you, oh angelic youth :),” and another, “Hi, cute kid! Looking at you from the bar … Leave the table and come home with me!!!! LOL.” Here, I saw that the unsolicited messages one receives on these apps can range from the weird to the disgusting to the downright hurtful.

It should be no surprise then, that many studies confirm that these dating apps are bad for mental health. Stories abound that racism is more prevalent on apps. They have also shown that men have a high risk of low self-esteem when using Tinder, and Grindr topped a poll of apps that make people feel unhappy.

People on apps are more willing to be mean behind the protection of a screen.

Along with apps, there exists a hook-up culture in the gay community. When I discussed this with Gilfillian, he said, “Dating is difficult. But hook-ups — that exists.” I replied, “This is obviously true,” and he agreed. The prevalence of a hook-up culture in place of dating is well-documented in scientific literature and generally agreed upon in the gay community. Gilfillian gave a potential explanation: “Intentions in gay spaces are more sexual because there are fewer opportunities elsewhere.” Hookups exist as a consequence of the difficulties of dating because they are a consolation — if you cannot fulfil your romantic desires, you might be able to fulfill at least your physical desires.

In the specific case of gay men, it is quite possible that men seek sex more and thus the lack of a supposedly less willing female sexual partner found in heterosexual relationships results in

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more hook-up centered relationships. Hook-up culture is not going away anytime soon and can hardly be good for gay health.

Another consequence of there being fewer gay people is that there is a lack of role models — or more broadly, examples of how to behave. Gilfillian is originally from rural Texas where, as one might imagine, gay people were invisible if not non-existent.

When I asked him about the transition to Harvard, he remarked that “seeing people at Harvard who were out was a very jarring experience — and not in a negative way. Seeing other people who were out was hugely important.” We are social creatures, and we learn how to behave from other people. If, especially in their high school years, gay people see few examples of how to behave, they are at a disadvantage. Meyer noted that “high school is the time, developmentally, when people learn about relationships, experiment with relationships, have relationships — that fact that there are fewer LGBT people plays a role in limiting those experiences.” The limited experience of gay people growing up may put LGBT people at a developmental disadvantage.

Even ignoring the difficulty of dating, at least one study shows that gay people are less likely to have close friendships.

One explanation for men that I have come up with from my own interactions is that guys — especially teenage guys — love talking about girls. Even if the claim that men think about sex once every seven seconds on average is a myth, research shows that straight men think about girls enough to heavily influence their day-to-day lives. If gay men are excluded from some significant part of nearly every lunchtime conversation, we can expect that they would have fewer friends. While gay guys can find groups of girls to hang out with, and finding close relationships with straight guys is not impossible, this phenomenon might explain a good part of why gay men, on average, have a harder time making friends.

Disease and depression, on average, appear to be more common in the gay community, and for many reasons that do not seem easy to fix. Even as the prospects for gay rights and tolerance grow better, gay people — and specifically, gay men — may still start off life with a disadvantage. However, all of these numbers exist on average. Even if it is more difficult for gay people to fall in love, it is certainly not impossible or even very uncommon. And progress is being made: consider that Barack Obama, who projected the colors of the pride flag onto the White House after the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage, was against gay marriage as recently as 2012. Gay life is better now than it has been at any time in American history. The expectations for progress were low before, but now they are moving startlingly higher. We have had every reason to be excited, but let us not aspire to unreasonable goals. If I advocate for a fair bit of pessimism, that pessimism is only relative to unprecedented optimism. n

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Harvard, Inc.

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n 382 years of power struggles, the Harvard administration has always seemed to come out on top; however, the recent protests to rehire former Harvard employee Mayli Shing and the newly enforced sanctions on single-gender student organizations have renewed the issue of power and accountability at Harvard. Even as secondary decisions are decentralized and presented as having been made with popular input, Harvard is careful to preserve all real power with a select few decision-makers.

This centralization of power ultimately privileges Harvard in negotiations, lessening its accountability and undermining student and employee perspectives on decisions that affect them.

HARVARD’S DECISION-MAKERS Harvard functions as it does thanks to the Harvard Corporation, made up of the president, fellows, and the Board of Overseers, which is voted in by Harvard degree-holders. These groups help govern Harvard, with the former making most financial decisions and the latter overseeing and organizing reviews. Meanwhile, the Office of the President and the deans help run Harvard on a day-to-day basis, while the Office of the Provost manages the faculty and various academic initiatives.

At the Harvard Corporation, four of the 12 fellows are chief executives of financial services companies, two are partners

Mimi Alphonsus

at major law firms, and the remainder are current and former university presidents and government officials. The Board of Overseers also consists predominantly of business executives, law partners, and government officials — with an astronaut, an author, and a violinist serving as the only exceptions.

Neither group has a single student or employee representative, and the Corporation does not have a single member below the age of 55. Students and employees even lack indirect representation, because the Corporation elects its own members and the Board of Overseers is voted in by alumni. These university organizations and their power-sharing mechanisms — or lack thereof — act in tandem with offices that help implement their policies. This draws a clear distinction between the governing and the governed.

THE PLACE OF HARVARD’S 16,000 EMPLOYEES When budgeting, academic policies, and university relations are decided at the highest level, it is difficult for the people working and studying on campus to make their voices heard. Labor relations at Harvard are largely determined through negotiations with seven unions. But the role of unions expands beyond work relations, and often the administration’s policies on sexual harassment, immigration, and scholarship come into play.

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The case of Mayli Shing, who claims she was fired for reporting sexual harassment, intersects with Harvard’s treatment of survivors of sexual assault and harassment as a whole. In an interview with the HPR, Geoff Carens, a member of the Harvard Union for Clerical and Technical Workers and representative of Mayli Shing, said that there was no investigation done into Shing’s sexual harassment allegations. “When her complaints weren’t addressed at the level they should have been, she started to CC [via email] university officials like the ombudsman and [then-President] Drew Faust. She was basically making sure the highest levels of the university understood what was happening.” For appealing to the highest powers of the university and making her presence felt, Mayli was threatened with termination.

“My experience is that when workers come forward, often the response is a slap in the face,” said Carens, arguing that almost every issue raised with the university is dealt with in bad faith. In the case of negotiating for contracts, for example, Carens alleges that Harvard intentionally draws out negotiations to force unions to make more painful concessions. The compensation and services that Harvard provides workers intersects with their budgeting, so upper level decision-making affects everyone employed. “They pretend the university is in financial crisis,” says Carens, explaining the justification workers receive for meager employment benefits. In reality, Harvard’s operating revenue and endowment has increased for the 2018 fiscal year.

Carens points to Harvard’s unwillingness to divest from fossil fuels to suggest that Harvard’s primary interest really is in making money. “They pick bean counters to be in the Corporation because they are just trying to keep the cost as low as possible.”

Harvard’s relentless opposition to unions further manifests itself in the argument that their primary goal is education. These arguments were on full display during the contentious formation of the Harvard Graduate Students Union, which the administration fought against tooth-and-nail for two years until it was officially formed in April. HGSU-UAW vows not only to improve working conditions for its members, but also to participate in negotiating for changes in Harvard’s research and teaching policies. In opposition to the union, Harvard first appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that graduate workers do not qualify for a union. Then, they held an election with an inaccurate list of eligible workers. Now that the union has officially formed, the Harvard administration is in the process of negotiating a contract. But Harvard’s treatment of the HGSUUAW is revealing. Throughout the case at the National Labor Relations Board, Harvard sent out multiple emails to the student body discouraging students from voting “yes” on the basis that education should not be politicized. They employed a similar argument during negotiations, saying, “the relationship between students and a university is, above all else, an academic one,” as provost Alan Garber wrote in an email to students in the spring of 2018. Yet many students, and certainly most workers, think that Harvard is first and foremost a political organization.

THE ROLE OF STUDENTS Even if students lend Harvard’s employee relations the benefit of the doubt despite its history of maliciously stifling union action, an examination of its relationship with students reveals even less accountability. There is a Shareholder Responsibility

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Committee in which students, alumni, and faculty make recommendations regarding where Harvard should invest its money, but this group lacks any real power. Harvard College’s student representative body, the Undergraduate Council, can only make recommendations to the administration and allocate limited funds for student activities.

“At the moment, there is the bare minimum amount of representation,” Nicholas Boucher, vice president of the UC, told the HPR. “The UC has a seat at the table, but they don’t have a vote.” When students make a decision of consequence, even if it lies overwhelmingly within the sphere of student life, Harvard’s administration has every power to intrude. In the context of Harvard’s contentious single-gender student organizations, Boucher explained that “we tried many student avenues, where we spoke with administrators and had events, [but] what ended up happening was that the president gave a mandate.” Boucher explained that students find the most power in the Committee on Student Life, where they chair the meetings, and in running proceedings to recognize student organizations. But even when it comes to student organizations, the administration technically maintains the power to veto UC decisions.

ALTERNATIVE POWER STRUCTURES While Harvard’s power structures are not unique to elite private universities in the United States, there certainly are alternatives. The HPR spoke to Abraham Baldry, a former president of the Students Union at the University of Sussex. Baldry explained how students had a vote on almost every committee at the university, ranging from finance committees to academic committees to the Council, which is the most powerful governing body.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Baldry explained. “Students began being represented in the ’90s when they started campaigning for it.” Baldry emphasized the power of student organizations to make meaningful change. “We were instrumental in replacing the vice chancellor, for example, but we didn’t just deal with student related matters. Students often are at the forefront of issues that were derided and then found to be on the right side of history.” Baldry sees a lot of potential in worker-student solidarity as well. “We saw our interests aligned, organizing to come together and using our collective bargaining power to further the interests of either group.”

The University of Toronto has a similar success story. It has multiple student and academic representatives on both the Governing Council and the Academic Board, the primary decisionmaking bodies. The University of Oxford also has representatives of their Student Union on the Education Committee, which makes decisions on academic matters, and on the General Purposes Committee, which can allocate funds and make regulations.

When neither students nor workers are represented at the highest level, they must ask who holds Harvard accountable.

There is an idealistic tendency to suggest that what makes an organization are its people, yet the case of Harvard strongly suggests otherwise. Following the money and the power, it becomes apparent that Harvard’s decision making bodies represent only the upper echelons of its administration; students, workers, and even faculty are often treated not as components of Harvard, but rather as its opponents. As Boucher told the HPR, “What comes from the president’s office is the law.” n

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A Desert in Cambridge Nina Elkadi

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arvard Square is an iconic place to grab a meal, play chess, or walk around and people-watch. For Harvard students, it is a great place to get away from the campus “bubble.” Restaurants such as El Jefe’s and Felipe’s are nightlife staples, while Grafton Street and Toscano are classic places to bring parents to pick up the tab. Harvard Square does a nice job of catering to the demands of wealthy Cambridge residents and college students, but it lacks accessible options for families of lower socioeconomic status, and graduate students on modest stipends, to find healthy food. Unfortunately, a grocery storefree neighborhood is more conducive to tourism than residence.

LIVING IN THE FOOD DESERT Harvard Square caters to the collegiate and higher-income Cambridge crowd. Almost all undergraduate students are on unlimited meal plans for the entirety of their time at Harvard, dispersing them to dining halls instead of nearby grocery stores.

Middle- and low-income families living in Harvard Square are left out of this equation, as are Harvard’s graduate students.

This often incites the need for alternative places to acquire food, such as food pantries. Tara Lauriat runs the St. Paul Parish Food Pantry located on Mt. Auburn Street along with a team of volunteers. At the pantry, customers pay $2 for a ticket that they can then use to get produce, bread, and two non-perishable items.

They receive their bread and desserts, which otherwise would have been discarded, from Hi-Rise Bread Company and Whole Foods. “Similar to a farm share, we determine how many of each item people can take based on how many we receive,” Lauriat told the HPR. Finding a meal in Harvard Square is not too difficult, but finding the provisions to prepare a meal often proves challenging. The Center for Disease Control defines food deserts as “areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet.” Harvard Square has few options for residents who are seeking fresh, affordable food. Aside from creating an unsustainable living environment, Harvard Square becomes literally uninhabitable for hoards of residents. “Among our regular customers are some Harvard graduate students and postdoctoral fellows,” Lauriat told the HPR. “Even if you are receiving a stipend as a grad student or postdoc, it doesn’t go very far in Cambridge when you are supporting a family.”

Nadirah Farah Foley, a doctoral student at Harvard, currently lives north of Harvard Yard and has to drive to get groceries.

“The relative inaccessibility of regular grocery stores was a big surprise to me when I started at Harvard,” Foley told the HPR. She initially lived in Peabody Terrace, which is near both Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. “When I moved out of [Peabody Terrace], I wound up signing a lease on an apartment near Cambridge Public Library, and I realized there were no grocery stores within a 10-minute walk.” In the winter, this problem is only magnified, especially for Cambridge residents without cars.

MAKING HARVARD SQUARE LIVABLE Understanding the uniqueness of Cambridge with regard to its outrageous cost of living is pivotal in understanding the lack of grocery options. Skyrocketing rent prices and gentrification in the Square express the dramatic changes the area has expe-

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rienced. Cambridge, including Harvard Square, is simply an unrealistic place to live without the finances to match. According to NeighborhoodScout, “Cambridge has experienced some of the highest home appreciation rates of any community in the nation . . . putting Cambridge in the top 10 percent nationally for real estate appreciation.”

Stacy Blondin is a Harvard College alumna and current postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her work focuses on dietary sustainability and food security-related research. “Harvard Square is like the airport to me,” Blondin told the HPR. “I’m going to pay twice as much for an apple just because I’m in the Square. Food shouldn’t cost more just because it’s in one place.”

With Harvard Square being the tourist attraction that it is, real estate has been sold to large investors, many of whom are more interested in the profitability than the livability of the Square. “The Square is kind of a unique place when it comes to food. They’re very much catering toward working professionals and tourists,” Blondin told the HPR. “If you don’t fall into any of those categories, you’re lost.”

GIVING BACK Harvard Square is far from representative of the rest of the world. The pricey food options and retailers that line the streets cater to one of the most expensive places to live in the nation, which alienates middle and low-income populations from settling comfortably here. It is not necessarily the “fault” of Harvard that its tourism and publicity raise the cost of living in the Square, but it is now the responsibility of Harvard to make sure it is doing what it can to give back to the surrounding community — and to alleviate the stressors that plague many of its students.

Harvard currently aides the community through a program in which leftovers from dining halls are donated to Food for Free. They donate on average 40,000 pounds of food a year and have expanded the program to begin creating pre-packaged meals from leftovers, which are not covered by food stamps.

This program has saved Harvard money, and given Harvard University Dining Services the data needed to see how much food they should be producing.

By acknowledging the unfortunate reality of its surroundings, Harvard can begin implementing more ways to help both the Cambridge community and its own students that struggle to find accessible and fresh food. Bringing an affordable grocery store to Harvard Square is an important first step in the larger process necessary to make Harvard more livable for its residents and graduate students. n

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RED AND BLUE ROBES

Clay Oxford

M

illions around the country were captivated by the spectacle, but when Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate on September 27, 2018, he had an audience of five senators — two Democrats, three Republicans. He needed to convince two; in the end, he won the support of three. Ten days later, Kavanaugh was sworn in as a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh’s 50-48 confirmation vote represented the smallest margin by which a justice was confirmed to the Supreme Court since Stanley Matthews’s appointment 137 years ago, at a time when the Senate had only 47 members. The man Kavanaugh replaces, Justice Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed 97-0.

The vote for Kavanaugh was sharply divided along party lines; only Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) voted against their respective parties. Historically, the Senate has given the president significant deference in judicial

nominations, and qualified Supreme Court nominees have usually been confirmed. In recent times, that deference has all but disappeared.

From the Supreme Court all the way down to the lowest state judgeships, partisanship is on the rise. Courts are more divided and decisions are more predictable as it becomes increasingly easy to apply the label “Democrat” or “Republican” to those on the bench. This partisanship, if it continues unabated, will continue to make it harder to find free and fair justice in America.

CONFIRMATION SPECTACLES In 1956, less than a month before the presidential election, Supreme Court Justice Sherman Winton retired, leaving Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower with an opening to

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UNITED STATES

fill. Eisenhower chose William Brennan, a Democrat, to fill the seat as a recess appointment and submitted him as his nominee to fill the seat on a permanent basis. Eisenhower’s conciliatory bet paid off, and he won the 1956 election in a landslide. A few months later, Brennan was confirmed by a voice vote.

This episode is emblematic of the way Supreme Court nominations used to proceed. Martin Redish, professor of law and public policy at Northwestern University, told the HPR that the senate nomination process “began with great deference to the president.” Prior to World War I, hearings for Supreme Court nominees were rare and usually closed to the public. If a hearing was held, the nominee often did not testify.

Today, the process is unrecognizable. As Joe Heck, a former U.S. representative from Nevada, told the HPR, “the underlying tone of the Senate … manifests itself in the confirmation process.” Thus, as the government has become more divided, so have judicial nominations. Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor, confirmed this: in earlier times opposition to nominees “didn’t manifest itself in opposition along political lines. There were lots of liberal Republicans and lots of conservative Democrats.” Today, however, those lawmakers have long been voted out, and their ability to build consensus has disappeared.

It is difficult to pinpoint the beginning of the shift toward a partisan process, but there have been several nominations that have set a new standard for the Senate’s willingness to play politics with the Supreme Court. In 1969 and 1970, Richard Nixon nominated Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the seat vacated by Abe Fortas. Both nominees were rejected over union labor and civil rights concerns, shocking the legal community. Almost two decades later, President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork was defeated on the basis of his previous opposition to the Civil Rights Act and allegations of his racist background, causing further tension.

More recently, when Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in February 2016, then-President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, who was widely seen as a compromise pick, to fill his seat.

However, with the GOP in control of the Senate, Mitch McConnell refused to give Garland even a hearing on the grounds that it was an election year and the seat should go to the winner of the 2016 election.

Finally, in 2017, McConnell lowered the threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to 51, invoking the “nuclear option.” Senate Republicans then proceeded to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court seat that had been held open since the end of the Obama administration. Gorsuch received two Democratic votes.

A year later, the country saw Kavanaugh confirmed with one Democratic vote.

AWAY FROM THE CAMERAS The lower federal courts have also been subject to increasing partisanship in the confirmation process. Redish used the example of a deputy attorney general who was nominated to the

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D.C. circuit at the end of Bush’s second term. Though he was “as competent as anybody could possibly be … because it was nearing the election, the Democrats just killed it.”

When Obama took office, Senate Republicans acted similarly.

During his first term, the number of filibustered nominees was almost as many as had been filibustered during the previous 11 presidencies together. In response to this obstructionism, Democrats responded by lowering the vote requirement to move a lower-court nominee past a filibuster from 60 votes to 51 votes, angering Republican lawmakers and undoubtedly contributing to their decision to “go nuclear” for Supreme Court nominees in 2017.

Today, Senate leaders also treat lower court nominations as bargaining chips to be used to further their political objectives.

This is exemplified by the recent deal between Democrats and Republicans to confirm 15 of President Trump’s judicial nominations in exchange for the freedom to leave Washington earlier to campaign for the 2018 midterms. Though partisan stunts over lower court nominees have existed for a while, they have increased over the past few years — partisanship is not limited to the Supreme Court.

ELECT OR APPOINT? In 38 states, judges are elected rather than appointed, a process nearly unheard of in the rest of the world. These elections have increased the partisanship in state courts around the country.

In some states, this increase has resulted from legislation.

North Carolina provides one example; in 2017, the Republican supermajority in the state legislature overrode Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that made state judicial elections partisan races. Additionally, the overall prevalence of money in politics has reached state judicial races, and outside groups are spending more than ever on state court races. According to the Brennan Center at NYU Law School, outside groups engaged in a “$27.8 million outside spending spree, making up an unprecedented 40 percent of overall Supreme Court election spending” during the 2015-2016 election cycle.

In other cases, the impetus for partisanship comes from the voters. Heck, who also served as a state senator from 2004 to 2008, said that in Nevada, though judges run as non-partisan, “people still want to know [with which party a judicial candidate is affiliated], and unfortunately, I think that’s what drives their decision in many cases.” In 2010, Nevada voters rejected a plan for the merit selection of judges.

Redish, in his book Judicial Independence and the American Constitution: A Democratic Paradox, likewise argues that judicial elections are so compromising as to be unconstitutional because they violate the requirement of an independent judiciary in the Constitution. While this view is outside of mainstream legal theory, it is clear that electing judges poses problems for the administration of justice and has resulted in increased polarization.

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THE VERDICTS As would be expected, rising polarization in the judicial selection process is leading to partisan case outcomes, and this shift is most obvious on the Supreme Court. “The court has always been an institution … where the justices’ values influence their decisions,” said Klarman. The court does not exist in a vacuum, and the justices are humans that view issues through the lens of their own experience. However, “the difference in the last 20 or 30 years is that the justices are not just political. …

They’re also pretty nakedly partisan.”

This partisanship is demonstrated by a stretch of recent cases. Though there have been close rulings on many contentious issues throughout the Court’s history, the consistency of the recent divide has been striking. “[It’s] hard to look at what the court has been doing over the last 10 or 20 years and not simply draw the conclusion that justices appointed by Republican presidents and justices appointed by Democratic presidents just serve the interests of their parties,” argued Klarman.

The effects of the partisan process on lower federal courts are less obvious, but it is likely that further partisanship in the confirmation process will lead to case outcomes that are explicitly partisan. With the obstructionism now present in confirmation battles, Republicans were able to hold open many judgeships throughout the federal judiciary for President Trump to fill, and he is now appointing conservative judges at an unprecedented rate in order to further Republican interests at all judicial levels.

Finally, the most profound effects on case outcomes have been in elected state courts. With the rise of outside money and increase in pressure from voters and state legislatures making it much harder to get elected as a judge running outside of the usual party apparatuses, judges have increased incentives to reflect partisanship in their rulings. One of many examples from around the country was reported by the New York Times. In 2004, Ohio Republican Justice Terrence O’Donnell’s reelection campaign accepted “thousands of dollars from the political action committees of three companies that were defendants in [upcoming lawsuits]. … Weeks after winning his race, Justice O’Donnell joined majorities that handed the three companies significant victories.”

Judicial elections also encourage judges to issue harsher rulings closer to elections in fear of television ads from the other party attacking them as soft on crime. According to a study by the Brennan Center, judges are more likely to rule against criminal defendants and to give harsher sentences in an election year.

These conclusions are supported by the experience of California Judge Aaron Persky, whose sentencing in the rape trial of a Stanford swimmer was widely criticized as being too lenient — two years after the trial, Persky was voted out of office. Independent of one’s opinion of Persky’s ruling, this example makes it clear that judicial elections can pose a conflict of interest for judges. Any judge wishing to remain in office must be aware of

the potential for media attention to impact his or her reelection prospects, and that creates a powerful incentive to judge a case based on popular opinion rather than its merits.

These are times of deep divisions between the left and the right in American society, and the courts are no exception.

Despite convictions like Heck’s that “the judiciary is supposed to be that non-partisan fair and equal arbiter of all things executive and legislative,” partisanship in the judicial confirmation process puts both the perception and execution of those values under threat. Societal polarization is threatening our courts, and unless the United States is able to reverse course, the judicial branch will become simply another victim of petty party politics. Without a return to independence from partisanship, due process will become increasingly hard to find. n

A woman protests the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in Washington D.C.

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Attack

Ilana Cohen

I

t only took 60 seconds of footage to make the message clear: “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” American voters were responsible for protecting the angelic toddler counting daisy petals against a full-blown nuclear crisis — and, by implication, a Goldwater presidency. According to the ad, Americans could only do one thing to save the nation from crisis: “vote for President Johnson on November 3rd.”

Since Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign released the first televised negative political ad, “Daisy,” in 1964, so-called attack ads have proliferated in American politics. While Amy Dacey, former CEO of the Democratic National Committee, maintained to the HPR that negative political ads play an important role in the democratic process by allowing candidates to contrast their platforms with their opponents’, it often seems that candidates use attack ads not to criticize their opponents on policy issues, but as vitriolic tactics that betray an interest in outright partisan warfare rather than in accountability. The hyper-personal and partisan nature of modern attack ads, driven largely by the growing influence of third parties and “dark money” on campaign politics, has exacerbated the divisions within an increasingly polarized and misinformed U.S. electorate. They therefore encourage voters to evaluate candidates based on the wrong criteria and leave many distrustful of the electoral process.

THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL U.S. politics saw dirty campaign tactics as early as the election of 1800, when the Founding Fathers slandered their op-

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ponents and exposed their extramarital affairs. Yet the advent of televised attack ads marked a new era of negative campaigning.

By granting campaigns more access to the public, television gave candidates a powerful new platform. Unlike print news and radio, television allowed them to make visceral emotional appeals, dramatically increasing the populace’s interest in elections.

Early attack ads often portrayed candidates as weak on economic and foreign policy issues. They would also claim that opposing candidates imperiled Americans’ future, often by citing their voting records and policy platforms. Today, however, attack ads attempt to create a lasting impression on voters by instead focusing on issues other than the candidates’ political stances.

Modern attack ads weaponize candidates’ characters and personal lives against them. Although no data conclusively shows that televised campaign ads have targeted candidates' individual traits more in recent decades, some evidence does suggest that this is the case. Data from the Wesleyan Media Project shows that only one-fourth of political ads aired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign made policy-related claims about Donald Trump. The vast majority of Clinton’s ads attacked his character, asking voters whether they would entrust the nation’s highest office to a “know-nothing candidate.”

These attacks reflect a trend of candidates making the personal intensely political. “There are no rules or guard rails any more,” political advisor Mark McKinnon told the HPR. “Nothing is off the table.” In 2004, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released a series of ads attacking then-presidential candidate John Kerry for his military record. The ads called Kerry “unfit for command” and accused him of lying about his

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service in the Vietnam War. Although inaccurate, the ads conveyed a powerful message to the American public: dishonest and unpatriotic, Kerry’s character alone disqualified him from the presidency.

For Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard professor and co-author of How Democracies Die, the growing tendency of candidates to accuse their “rivals of not being legitimate contenders for office” represents a dangerous turn in the electoral process. It also “violat[es] an unwritten rule of our politics.”

In a new approach to delegitimizing the opposition, more recent attack ads have featured candidates’ own family members warning voters against supporting them. This September, six siblings of Republican Congressional candidate Paul Gosar criticized their brother for “not caring” about rural Arizona voters in an ad endorsing his Democratic opponent, David Brill. Also in September, an ad attacking Democratic Congressional candidate Randy Bryce featured Bryce’s own brother, James Bryce, invoking his experience as a police officer while also discussing his brother’s hostility to law enforcement and habitual criminality.

“Family’s more believable,” explained professor Steven Jarding of the Harvard Kennedy School. Jarding described how voters often perceive candidates’ family members as more credible than candidates themselves. Instead of showing traditionally humanizing displays of family unity, political advertising has begun spotlighting candidates’ family feuds as families themselves have come to embody the increasingly polarized electorate.

DOG-WHISTLE POLITICS

Like character attacks, dog-whistle politics inflame ideological bases and contribute to a culture of polarization. Even when masked by references to candidates' policies, the use of “dog whistles,” or racially coded appeals, in political ads serve a clear end — to drive voters to the polls by playing to their prejudices.

A staple of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, “dog whistles” have become a favored tactic in U.S. politics.

In 1988, the infamous “Weekend Passes” ad attacking Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis for his “weakness on crime” featured a striking image of black inmate Willie Horton, who had been charged with murder and rape. Making Dukakis’s image synonymous with Horton’s, the ad stoked white voters’ fears and devastated the Dukakis campaign. Two years later, Republican Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad attacking African American Senate candidate Harvey Gantt depicted a pair of white hands tearing up a job rejection letter, suggesting that Gantt’s alleged support for racial quotas would deny hard-working white Americans employment.

Today, race continues to pervade attack ads in more subtle and dangerous forms. In an analysis of language used by political candidates from 1984 to 2016, researchers at the University of Michigan found that “campaign rhetoric in 2016 included more racial rhetoric, negative racial group outreach, and negative mentions of racial groups than any other campaign they studied.”

This trend seemed particularly manifest during the 2018 midterms. Earlier this year, for instance, an attack ad against African American Congressional candidate Antonio Delgado included selected portions of his rap music. Appealing to an 84 percent-

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white district, the ad among other things cited his music’s “profane lyrics” and claimed that Delgado’s songs were “laced … with extremist attacks on American values.” The ad went on to claim that Delgado could not represent his district in Congress as a result.

Alongside rhetoric, campaigns have used media optics to fuel racial politics. A study by Stanford University involving an analysis of over 100 ads from the 2008 presidential election showed that attack ads against Barack Obama used darker-skinned images of him. This trend suggests that advertisers intended to invoke racial stereotypes in attempts to delegitimize Obama’s candidacy.

This negative racial messaging has become more effective since the 1980s because it has become more subliminal, with studies suggesting that less explicit race-based appeals are more likely to impact voters. “It’s disgusting and unsconsiencable but the reason that they do it is that it works,” said Jarding, recalling a notorious 2006 ad which attacked African American Senate candidate Harold Ford. Jarding considers these race-based ads “the darkest form of political maneuvering.” As long as dog whistles remain effective, however, campaigns will likely continue to use them in their ads to tactically exploit racial divisions among voters.

DARK MONEY AND MASS MEDIA Many voters may not realize that the attack ads they watch are produced not by campaigns but by super PACs. The outsized role of “dark money” in political advertising has been a primary driver of the hyper-partisan and polarizing nature of modern attack ads, providing both a boon and a burden for political candidates.

Negative advertising from third parties can elevate candidates while insulating them from responsibility for pernicious attacks on their opponents. Even candidates who claim to run all-positive campaigns often benefit from the attack ads produced on their behalf. “It’s somewhat duplicitous,” remarked Harvard Institute of Politics Fall Fellow and Former Congressman Joe Heck, who noted to the HPR how such candidates may refrain from denouncing or requesting the removal of outside attack ads.

Yet in trying to uplift their preferred candidates, third parties diminish those candidates’ ability to control the media narratives of their campaigns. Since FEC regulations prohibit coordination between political candidates and super PACs, candidates theoretically have no knowledge of or participation in the ads produced on their behalf until they are released — although the weakness of these regulations has admittedly enabled the two groups to work precariously closely together. Still, Heck explained, third parties may develop ads intended to boost candidates that do not align with a campaign’s strategy or objectives.

Despite having no role in these ads’ production, candidates are expected by the public to respond to them, especially when the ads attack their rivals. Heck lamented that this causes candidates to stray off their message since they must react to the ads instead of proactively discussing their desired issues.

For third party producers of negative ads, social media provides a unique opportunity to expand these videos’ reach.

Super PACs benefit not only from the ability to target specific voter demographics on social media platforms but also from the

platforms’ natural promotion of their content. Nathan Rifkin, Digital Director for the Randy Bryce Congressional campaign, explained to the HPR how social media channels’ algorithms “reward a negative-based attack.” As negative ads tend to generate substantial commentary, they are often amplified by social media platforms seeking to connect users with popular, attention-grabbing content.

Beyond amplifying their reach, social media allows third parties to retain a degree of anonymity that can increase the efficacy of their advertising. Whereas televised political ads disclose sponsors, identifying ads’ sponsors proves more difficult on social media. Jian Zang, a Harvard graduate student and creator of the Political Ads Library, explained to the HPR how super PACs often fund ads across multiple social media pages so that voters may not even realize when they are being targeted by PAC-sponsored ads. Priorities USA Action, for instance, sponsors ads on the “Nuestra Florida” Facebook page. By creating a kind of “echo chamber,” these pages can amplify singular campaign narratives that feed directly into voters’ preconceptions of the opposite party.

DEMOCRATIC BREAKDOWN By substituting policy discussion with severe attacks on candidates’ personal traits, negative political advertising may lead voters to question not only the legitimacy of their candidates but also the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. With the influence of third parties further calling electoral legitimacy into question, some people, including Jarding, believe that American democracy is under serious threat.

The proliferation of attack ads weakens the potential for bipartisan politics in the U.S. legislature as well. Although it is hard to objectively measure overall levels of bipartisanship, and some metrics indicate that bipartisanship is not declining, much evidence does suggest that Congress is becoming less bipartisan.

Research published in PLOS One in 2015, for example, shows a substantial increase in the polarization of Congress, with a majority of legislators now voting strictly along party lines.

Attack ads can exacerbate this trend by sowing distrust among candidates of opposite parties before they even reach office. “There is a holdover even if the ad is done by a third party,” stated Heck. For Jarding, this “holdover effect” also entails an indebtedness of elected candidates to the third parties who propped up their campaigns. A resulting focus on catering to donors over serving the public, Jarding believes, has effectively “neutered” Congress.

TIME FOR ACTION Modern attack ads are both symptomatic of and contributive to an increasingly polarized political climate, and erode the electorate’s faith in the credibility of political candidates.

These ads also damage candidates’ faith in the sincerity of their political opponents. Jarding puts the onus on voters to step up and combat this problematic political culture: “For anybody that thinks democracy is invincible, it’s not. You have to work for it.”

Without a collective effort to address the issues illuminated by modern attack ads, the public’s perception of the legitimacy of elections may continue to deteriorate. n

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Beyond the Classroom Will Boggs

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he spacious, collaborative space gleams with ergonomic chairs and large windows. Groups cluster at various tables, working on projects like monitoring water quality, creating educational video games, and increasing Wi-Fi accessibility. Other small groups plan for meetings with local leaders and businesses that they will be in contact with over the course of a project. This could be an office in Silicon Valley, a think tank, or a consulting group. Surprisingly, however, it is not. The people here are not adults; they are high school students in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and this is their high school curriculum.

This is Iowa Big, a half-day, project-based public school — without admissions prerequisites — based in Cedar Rapids. This school focuses its education outside of the classroom, through projects and community engagement. Iowa Big is revolutionizing its students’ educations and engaging them in unprecedented ways. Although other schools may not need to entirely overhaul their curriculums and leave the traditional classroom, they could definitely consider aspects of this model as a way to get students to engage more deeply.

CURRICULUM FROM CRISIS In 2008, devastating floods ravaged Iowa, and the Cedar Rapids community faced a daunting rebuilding project. Infrastructure was renovated and education was reformed. As part of

this initiative, Iowa Big co-founders Trace Pickering and Shawn Cornally invited roughly 50 business and community leaders to return to school to do everything students would do, including tests, assignments, and discussions. In an interview with the HPR, Iowa Big teacher Nate Pruett explained how after completing the interactive immersion, the evaluators saw “fundamentally bored and disengaged students,” could not believe that they “forgot how siloed the disciplines are,” and recognized “that teachers are trying their best to make the content relevant and engaging, but fundamentally it is not working.” Echoing similar themes, Pruett himself described the typical classroom as a place where “by and large, the engagement is very low. It is sporadic.

It is not consistent.” Could the traditional, structured classroom be obsolete? Pruett would say there is a good chance. “If it’s not obsolete yet, [the traditional model] is moving towards becoming obsolete.”

To combat this trend, Iowa Big set out to create a model that optimizes engagement, connects students to their communities, and gives them real-world skills like collaboration and communication. In creating its student body, Iowa Big draws from three different Iowa school districts. Students place into the school for half of the day, usually by a lottery system, spending the morning at their home high schools and spending the afternoon at the program. For projects, the school stipulates that a student shows genuine passion, finds interdisciplinary connections, and works

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Experiential learning would allow students to gain hands on experience alongside their regular education.

closely with a third-party audience. Staff members of the school go out into the community and solicit project ideas from local businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations, and students work directly with these entities. “It isn’t a predetermined outcome. We believe in step zero, and we need our kids to begin at step zero so that the project becomes theirs,” Pruett explained.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING EXPLAINED Iowa Big’s curriculum is certainly experiential, and the school would argue that its experiential components set it apart from other schools by allowing it to connect students to the meaning of their work. What “experiential learning” entails, however, can be vague: it ranges from completely immersive activities — like actual farming to complement an environmental science curriculum — to doing interactive activities, such as a mock congress or debate within a normal history class setting.

To this end, Northern Illinois University refers to experiential learning as “learning through action, learning by doing, learning through experience, and learning through discovery and exploration.”

Alternatively, many experts reserve terms like “experiential” for specific programs like Iowa Big. In an interview with the HPR, professor Kathryn Boudett, a senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explained that a more accurate way to refer to the action plan that many schools looking to improve their curriculums would undertake is

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something like “authentic opportunities to process information, experiment with the way [students] communicate, and productively struggle.” Boudett continued, “I just don’t want to co-opt the word ‘experiential,’” reserving it for schools with more alternative curriculums.

In fact, many schools are limited in their resources and cannot necessarily provide “experiential” methods in truly outsideof-the-classroom ways like field trips, community engagement, and outdoors activities. But even within the typical classroom, “there’s still a wide range of the level at which you allow students to experience the learning process,” according to Boudett.

Boudett cites reference models like the flipped classroom as being effective and practical. Within the classroom itself, Boudett clarified that the role of the teacher should not necessarily be “the sage on the stage,” but rather “the guide on the side,” igniting the learning experience in students but not taking exclusive control over it.

That being said, schools which are more or less traditional but do have the resources to incorporate some experiential elements, like field trips, outdoor activities, and internships, could take advantage of these opportunities to supplement and enhance curriculums. For example, the School Without Walls, a public magnet high school on the campus of George Washington University in the District of Columbia, integrates international travel, internships, partnerships with institutions like the Kennedy Center, cross-registration with GW, and field trips into its curriculum. Like Iowa Big, SWW also seeks to include third par-

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ties in its curriculum; student research papers will be graded by GW or local law firm partners.

In creating this dynamic, SWW places a great deal of trust in its students, allowing them to arrive at sites independently and to use the city as their broader school environment. “Students get to use the city; they get to use the transportation system,” SWW principal Richard Trogisch told the HPR. Programs ranging from visiting Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court to actively participating in the Anacostia River clean-up project “lend themselves to students wanting to come to school,” explained Trogisch. Likewise, by combining internships, field trips, and other factors, Trogisch believes his students learn a great deal of maturity and time management relative to the students at other schools where he has taught. These experiences mitigate many of the pitfalls in decision-making and time management that high school students often face as they move onto college and beyond.

Likewise, in an almost completely opposite setting, the Mountain School brings together 45 high school juniors for one semester to study, live, and work on the school’s farm in rural Vermont. Alden Smith, Director of the Mountain School, stresses that the curriculum is crucial in helping the students become more mature and independent. Like the SWW, the Mountain School still utilizes a relatively traditional classroom model but takes advantage of its setting in order to incorporate its environment into its coursework. To further integrate the school’s setting into its curriculum and allow students to experience the beauty of rural Vermont firsthand, the school adds chores, farming, hiking, and other work to its curriculum.

As Smith told the HPR, “students are often better equipped to become authors of their own learning” as a result of the school’s model and focus on self-sufficiency. By the time students leave the Mountain School to return to their home high schools, Smith hopes that students will “learn more about their energy and their food, become masters of their own learning, [and] have much more of a collaborative mindset in terms of their learning.” Moreover, they “will certainly see food systems and the Northern Forest and our built spaces as systems worthy of our study.” Despite their obvious differences, both SWW and the Mountain School believe that immersion and integration in their environments both enhance their curriculums and provide students with intangible skills.

The innovations that schools like Iowa Big, SWW, and the Mountain School set out to create are thus not necessarily programs that exist outside of the context of larger systems. Experiential learning has a long history, and regional and national networks feature experiential learning in their missions. John Dewey wrote his famous Experience and Education in 1938, and leading experiential learning theorists like David Kolb have been active for 50 years. Associations like Big Picture Learning partner with hundreds of schools to foster “student-driven, real-world learning.” Experiential learning is not a novel, isolated topic, and its continued integration remains an important consideration.

TREPIDATION AROUND EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

rather than imparting knowledge. With these considerations in mind, the lecture is perhaps not the most effective model.

Nontheless, John Kijinski, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Fredonia, would argue that experiential techniques, while helpful, should not replace academic coursework.

Kijinski stipulates, for example, that a political science major should opt to take a non-required statistics course, related to but not falling within the major, rather than doing a service-based internship with a state legislator, assuming the student can only pick one. In Kijinksi’s opinion, the coursework provides foundational background skills that facilitate and preempt applied learning.

“Many of the same programs that require or strongly recommend ‘engaged learning’ also allow students to graduate who are unable to read or speak proficiently any language other than English, whose quantitative abilities don’t allow them to understand even mid-level mathematical analysis, and who are not demonstrably able to write clearly and persuasively about complex topics,” Kijinski writes in his article “On ‘Experiential Learning.’” Solving complex math problems, pouring over philosophical treatises, and piecing together the steps of human evolution, as mentioned by Kijinski, teach students to think — “and not one of them features ‘real-life’ engagement.” Ultimately, according to Kijinski, students have a lifetime to engage with “real-world” problems but will only be students until their young adulthood.

LOOKING FORWARD The question about how to structure the learning experience thus remains an open one, but engagement and student involvement are unequivocally crucial elements. An even more pressing question is how teachers can initiate that engagement. While an hour-long lecture may not be effective, completely removing students from the classroom may not have to be the solution. Even if it is, not all schools have the time and resources to do so.

With these questions in mind, a school needs to balance classroom learning with experiential elements. At Iowa Big, students spend half of their days at traditional high schools, and Pruett himself teaches a literature seminar that looks similar to other high school and college discussion-based courses. As Trogisch mentioned, too, the SWW, for all of its field trips and independence it grants its students, still values Advanced Placement courses and uses them as a barometer of student achievement.

Lastly, as Smith explained, even though farming is an integral part of the Mountain School curriculum, the classroom environment itself is still relatively traditional. As at the SWW, students may still take AP classes.

Ultimately, schools should savor every opportunity they can get to engage with the community, promote student internships, or incorporate field trips, as these elements augment the curriculum in way that cannot be achieved within the classroom alone.

That being said, total experiential learning is not necessarily the required solution, and it is not always practical for many schools.

The traditional classroom setting can still be effective, provided that teachers reimagine it to acknowledge that students are the ones truly in charge of their education. n

Fully experiential methods create profound student involvement, and within the classroom setting, teachers should probably allocate the majority of time to actively engaging students

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SECURITY IN A DIGITAL WORLD Roger Cawdette

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n a Friday afternoon in late September, Facebook announced that it had been the subject of a major security breach. Hackers had infiltrated the social network, gaining access to around 50 million personal accounts, the worst attack in the the company’s history. Later reports speculated that the perpetrator might have been a foreign power, sparking further concerns about the state of cybersecurity in the United States.

In recent years, the issue of cybersecurity has garnered significant attention in the national conversation. Attacks like those on Facebook as well as others have caused Americans to worry about the security of their personal information and whether or not they are sufficiently protected from such potential threats.

Recent reports have shown a significant increase in the number of cyberattacks, many perpetrated against large banks and other institutions with highly sensitive information. The contrast to a decade ago, when cyberattacks were much less prevalent, is stark.

THE INTENT OF THE HACKER The question of what motivates hackers is a complicated one.

While it is commonly assumed that cybercrime is fueled by the desire for financial gain, there are many instances in which the motives are also socially, ideologically, or politically based. One kind of internet activism, “hacktivism,” operates on all of these principles. This is when hackers commit cybercrime to promote some form of social change, whether that be freedom of speech, freedom of information, or human rights. Take the case of Anonymous, a group which publishes classified information obtained from hacks under the ideological goal of transparency.

In light of this, it could be argued that not all cybercrime is necessarily harmful. As precedent shows, hacking has the ability to effect social change. At the start of the Arab Spring, Anonymous worked to bring media attention to the protests in Tunisia, restore access to websites censored by the government, and write code allowing activists to avoid government surveillance.

Experts say that hackers have become more emboldened as a result of new technologies that allow them to infiltrate systems with relative ease. These developments, while impressive and exciting from a technological standpoint, also pose a significant threat to many sectors of the U.S. economy — energy, healthcare, and transportation, to name a few. In addition, financial gain is almost guaranteed with the use of tools such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood networks with uncontrolled traffic, preventing the system from operating. A ransom is then demanded in return for ending the attack. In an age where digital networks are critical for normal operations, companies are often more than willing to hand over the ransom if it means getting their systems back.

THE STATE OF CYBERSECURITY Unfortunately, the United States is an epicenter for this sort of activity. As Ross Rustici, the Director of Intelligence Services for cybersecurity firm Cybereason, said in a recent interview with the HPR: “America is probably in the upper 25 percent in terms of defense, but for the most part that is woefully inadequate.” The former Department of Defense cyber analyst also added that while the U.S. government has made a “good ef-

fort” in addressing the issue, it lacks “the authority to enforce change” as there are no legal obligations for companies to have high standards of cybersecurity.

The general consensus of experts in the industry is that there will never be 100 percent protection and hackers will always be able to find a way into systems. As new defenses are constructed, so are new openings and points of vulnerability waiting to be exploited. Brian Park, co-founder of Sparklabs Cyber+Blockchain, a D.C. based cyber startup accelerator, equated this phenomenon with a game of “cat and mouse” in an interview with the HPR. Even as developers invent new cyber defense technology, attackers are one step ahead, already designing ways to circumvent these new obstacles. However, as pointed out by Park, not all defenses are completely cyber-based. Hackers also choose to take advantage of the weakest point of any security system: humans. Many companies use people as their first line of defense, whether that be an over the phone customer representative for a bank or a security guard at a data storage site. In many cases, individuals can easily be tricked into granting access, as seen in the case of the popular IRS scams, where people are persuaded to hand over their social security number to avoid fines.

OFFENSE IS THE NEW DEFENSE In light of these threats, many have argued that companies and the government need to start going after these hackers, attacking them before they attack us. In a September 2018 op-ed for the Ripon Forum, Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, argued in favor of a more attack-minded approach: “We have played defense long enough when it comes to cybersecurity. It is time to go on offense.” Although the government is able to act on this strategy, it is illegal for companies according to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The law, which was passed during the Reagan administration, was in response to the movie WarGames, in which a high school student hacks into a military supercomputer and nearly starts a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The movie, albeit fictional, was enough to convince President Reagan and the U.S. government that companies could not be trusted when it came to hacking, especially on the off chance that it might lead to conflict with a foreign state.

President Trump appears to agree with Rounds. This past August he issued a directive — the National Security Presidential Memorandum 13 — which allows the Department of Defense more freedom in launching cyber operations against adversaries of the United States. The policy, a strong shift from the that of the Obama administration, has been criticized for its recklessness in that it might lead to an escalation of cyber conflicts and diplomatic tension abroad.

THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE REACTION In response to the increasing threat of cyberattacks, both the private and public sectors have devoted more attention and resources to the issue. The cybersecurity industry, in particular, has seen rapid expansion with projected year-to-year growth rates of 10 to 12 percent through 2021. A Business Insider report estimates that over $655 billion will be spent on security services by 2020. Furthermore, research conducted by Morgan Stanley shows that the global average cost of cybercrime increased by 62

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percent between 2013 and 2017. Despite the increased investment in security technology and services, the continued rise of cybercrime demonstrates the need for more efficient and effective solutions. In step with the private sector, the government has begun to allocate more resources towards mitigating cyber threats. The Trump administration’s 2019 budget proposal requests $15 billion for total cybersecurity funding, up from $13.1 and $14.4 billion in 2017 and 2018, respectively. However, many have found this budget increase perplexing given the president’s decision to eliminate the role of cyber coordinator on the National Security Council, the top cyber official of the U.S. government.

Congress has also taken measures to improve the nation’s cyber capabilities, with some lawmakers calling for legislation similar to the General Data Protection Regulations of the European Union, enacted in May 2018. The GDPR is designed to protect the personal data of consumers processed or held by companies within the European Union. It guarantees consumers the right to access their data, the right to have their data deleted, and the right to withdraw their data at any time. Additionally, it requires companies to have a chief data protection officer, notify users of a security breach within 72 hours, and comply with a number of other conditions. If a company fails to meet any of these standards, they are subjected to a fine of up to 4 percent of their global annual turnover. Proponents of the law argue that, given recent cyber attacks, the implementation of legislation like the GDPR in the United States is necessary, as it gives consumers more access and ability to protect their data, an important aspect of cybersecurity. In an emailed statement to the HPR, Dimitri Sirota, the CEO of BigID, a cybersecurity firm based in New York City, described the GDPR as a “winning issue for all political parties” and that “all aspects of the regulation would benefit the U.S.” That said, not everyone agrees. Some opponents have argued that the cost of these requirements places an unneeded burden on companies.

While the future of legislation like the GDPR in the United States is uncertain, Congress has already made tangible changes to face cyber threats. On October 3, Congress passed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, which will establish a standalone cybersecurity agency under the Department of Homeland Security. The policy is significant in that it essentially names DHS as the main authority in addressing cyber threats. Moreover, it also centralizes much of the government’s cyber resources under one entity, a much-needed improvement.

Prior to the law, the United States had large cyber programs housed under multiple departments, a situation which allowed for miscommunications, confusion over authority, and general inefficiencies. Although this is a step in the right direction, there are also concerns as to how successful the agency will be. Many experts in the cyber industry believe that a significant amount of additional funding and personnel is still needed to properly address the threat of cyberattacks, especially if this agency is expected to be the country’s main line of cyberdefense.

ADDITIONAL PLANS AND PROPOSALS Going forward, it is clear that the U.S. government needs to do much more to secure the country from evolving forms of cyberattacks. In recent years, Congress has made many improvements and finally begun allocating more resources towards

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addressing this threat. However, more funding and research is required. One option for the future is to increase the cooperation between the public and private sectors, as cyber experts and analysts in the industry have the most up-to-date knowledge on today’s threats and could be of significant benefit to lawmakers. Another is the establishment of a body similar to President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Such a project would allow the government and its agencies to reassess the current state of cybersecurity in the United States, identifying the main vulnerabilities in our cyberinfrastructure.

Lastly, public education programs on cybersecurity could also prove to be useful.

America and its companies are not fully aware of the threat that cyberattacks pose. People need to be better informed about the threats they face, how to limit exposure, and what resources they have access to in the event of a cyber attack. “We need to take this threat seriously and prepare for it,” said Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) in a recent interview with the HPR. “The next cyber attack is coming — it’s not a matter of if, but when.” n

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DON’T TAKE MY GUNS

Hannah Fontaine

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ourteen years have passed since the United States last had any gun control policies in effect. Despite the 32 percent surge in gun related deaths between 2014 and 2016 and the continuing upward trend in gun deaths, Congress has not passed any nationwide gun control legislation since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Many Americans have been campaigning for stricter gun laws because of this inaction, and their movement has been gaining momentum.

However, despite the widespread gun violence of the last few decades, many Americans still oppose stricter gun laws. With their support, organizations like the National Rifle Association stonewall gun reform efforts while citing the Second Amendment as justification. The culture surrounding guns in America differs vastly from those in other developed countries, making it much harder to implement effective policy change. The origins of this culture lie deep in American history, but many different aspects of it manifest in everyday life.

The United States’ past genocidal settler culture, as well as its highly militaristic and nationalistic culture, have given guns great significance in American society historically and in the present day. Socially, unlike much of the rest of the world, many Americans view guns as helpful tools instead of dangerous weapons designed to inflict pain. To change this culture, the United States must fund research into guns and gun violence to come up with a data-backed solution that can be legislatively

implemented, while also increasing public awareness of the dangers posed by guns.

GUNS, SETTLERS, AND INDIVIDUALISM From the very beginning, guns featured prominently in white settlements of what would eventually become the United States.

Several colonies had laws requiring all homes to be armed with a gun, but even then guns were viewed as necessary tools and nothing out of the ordinary. Guns played an essential role in survival for colonial Americans, who required them to obtain food.

Colonists also needed guns to maintain order; without proper armies or police forces, settlers relied on militias led by community leaders to enforce laws.

As the United States expanded west, the idea of manifest destiny began to gain currency. Many white Americans believed that they had a God-given right to move west and deliver the message of Christianity to the Native American population, and they often did so with guns. Violence abounded on the westward front as most families held arms to hunt for food and to protect themselves from wild animals during their journeys, as well as to kill Native Americans under the guise of spreading Christianity.

After the westward expansion, gun sales began to decline as they became less necessary for survival. To combat this, gun companies began marketing their guns as sources of power and

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symbols of individualism. They supposedly provided the last line of defense for the average white American man who wanted to protect his family, and also served as a reminder of the Wild West, where men had to take law into their own hands. This route of advertising proved successful, and guns continued to remain relevant. In Connecticut, Winchester and Colt, two of the main gun manufacturers, began quickly and efficiently creating guns to meet this demand.

The image of the Wild West and the gun-toting cowboy became essential to gun culture in the United States. Western films and shows ranked among the most popular for decades, especially for young boys. Gun manufacturers began to market guns to children as a rite of passage, which further engrained this concept into young minds. Guns were no longer seen as dangerous tools, but as a symbol of power, protection, and individualism.

Today, gun ownership is still deeply rooted in this idea of individualism. This individualism manifests itself in some people’s uniquely American combination of love for their country and distrust of its government; they see a need for guns as protection from the government or in case of government failure. Like their ancestors before them, these individuals feel that they cannot trust their wellbeing to a large and far-off institution, and so they hold onto their firearms as their last line of defense.

MILITARISM Militarism also influences America’s love for guns. The United States has always placed a heavy emphasis on its military. The link between firearms and militaristic and nationalistic tendencies dates back to the Revolutionary War, when muskets played a vital role in defending the colonies. This war for independence ignited a centuries-long appreciation of the gun and its ability to protect freedom, which it has now come to symbolize.

America’s current devotion to its military also further strengthens the nation’s gun-positive culture. The United States’ military budget is larger than that of any other country in the world and continues to rise every year. America also celebrates Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day, respectively dedicated to celebrating veterans and the armed forces. This veneration of the military and military spending, as well as the romanticization of the military through movies, video games, and television, all contribute to militarism and patriotism in the United States, which in turn fuels love for the military’s primary weapon, the gun.

This militaristic mindset also causes many Americans to seek out guns as protection against threats from perceived outside forces, much like soldiers in an army would. Acts of violence by people that many Americans view as “others,” such as terrorist attacks perpetrated by extremist factions and mass shootings that do not fall under that category, tend to spike gun sales. These purchases only create the illusion of safety since untrained individuals cannot reliably defend themselves with firearms. They also increase the chance that guns fall into unsafe hands, such as those of a child or violent criminal.

MOVING FORWARD Changing how Americans understand guns will take a lot of work. The veneration of firearms is deeply embedded in the culture of the United States and has been for centuries. Despite this

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obstacle, The United States can implement safe gun laws, especially with the support of gun owners. Peter Ambler, director of Giffords, an organization dedicated to fighting the gun violence epidemic, said in an interview with the HPR that “We can allow responsible, lawful, firearm ownership in this country while still implementing policies that prevent thousands of people from dying every year.” It is most critical that people who consider themselves to be responsible gun owners take the time to look into gun research and educate themselves on the issue.

David Hemenway, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, noted that changing exactly what people perceive as responsible gun ownership is important, too. “Selling a gun to stranger without a background check should just be morally wrong and not considered,” he said.

Hemenway added that responsible gun owners and advocates are part of the solution, not the problem.

Cathy Barber, a director at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, agrees that changing this perception is vital. She told the HPR that “things like universal background checks would be helpful, but we need to figure out how guns are being moved to the illegitimate market where people are able to buy them without background checks.”

Barber has seen positive results from working with people on both sides of the issue: “For the culture change to work, we need people who do like guns and people who don’t like guns looking at local issues and working together, instead of arguing about legislation.” She explained that change has to start locally and look at each area’s specific problems to be most effective.

Despite this, Barber does not think legislation is the first step.

“We’re still figuring out the actual problem we need to solve,” she said. “You don’t start with legislation, you start with understanding the problem.” Understanding the root of the problem and encouraging people on both sides to work together is key to changing the toxic aspects of gun culture in the United States.

In order for this change to happen, we need to understand and change the culture of militarism and recognize the history of violence in the United States that has caused this. With increased funding for gun control research, more information is becoming available on how policies can and do prevent deaths from guns.

In order for change to occur, people must vote based on these facts with the intention to change policies. Ambler advised that people do their research and “don’t vote for anybody who isn’t going to make solving the problem a priority.” Hemenway cited young voters as critical, because they tend to be “much more liberal and reasonable than older people about gun issues.”

He added that “voting matters if a lot of individuals do it. Big success stories involve mobilizing a lot of different groups and working together.”

The process to change these laws may be slow, but the movement has been gaining momentum. Citizens should vote for candidates who will fight for the policies they desire in all elections, not just during the presidential election. Raising the issue with politicians, having conversations with family and friends, and demanding government funded gun research will all help to change the culture and policies in the United States. It may be a slow fight, but for the sake of the 40,000 people who die by guns every year, something has to change. 

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MANY SMALL ISLANDS, ONE BIG

PROBLEM Kendrick Foster

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I

n mid-October, President Donald Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview with 60 Minutes. During the program, Trump said he did not know if climate change was man-made, and claimed that “it could very well go back” to previous climate patterns. Only a few days earlier, the United Nations released a report saying the world needs to make “rapid and deep” emissions cuts in order to hold global warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial baselines.

Throughout the Pacific Ocean, island states are worried about both of these developments. Trump’s words and his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement have reduced the likelihood that the United States will reduce its emissions at all, much less make deep or rapid cuts. Failure to do so means that some countries will quite literally cease to exist. More than 10 million people call the 25,000 islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia home, and climate change puts their lives and livelihoods at risk.

Despite the many steps they are taking to mitigate the risks of climate change and adapt to a new world of rising temperatures and rising oceans, climate change unfortunately continues to pose an existential threat to many low-lying Pacific countries and territories. To improve their chances of survival in a world of rising seas, these island states have banded together to form a bloc pushing for international climate actions. The international community must take steps to address their demands.

RISING SEAS, GROWING STORMS Rising seas are the most salient impact of climate change on the Pacific Islands. As Patrick Nunn, associate director of the Sustainability Research Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast, told the HPR over email, rising sea levels caused by thermal expansion of water and the melting of glaciers threaten the survival of low-lying areas through “shoreline erosion, increased lowland flooding, and groundwater salinization.” Shoreline erosion and flooding decreases the amount of habitable land, while groundwater salinization decreases the availability of freshwater. Changing precipitation patterns also lead to issues with water management, producing increased droughts but also increased flooding.

At a more extreme level, sea-level rise can wash away entire islands. “Coral atolls have a maximum elevation of three meters, and if we’re looking at three meters of sea level rise at the end of the century, as some projections are saying, the impact is devastating,” Elisabeth Holland, director of the Pacific Center for Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, told the HPR from a meeting of the World Meteorological Conference in Tonga. “Even on high islands, more than 80 percent of the population lives near the coast … [and] a third of the current communities are already identifying they’ll need to be moved.”

Reports abound of the devastating impacts of sea level rise: islands have disappeared in the Solomon Islands and Micronesia, gun emplacements on dry land during World War II are now 20 feet offshore in Tuvalu, and Kiribati’s capital of Tarawa faces 80 percent inundation by 2050 without significant measures to fight or reverse rising seas. Kiribati, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands, all composed of low-lying atolls, could cease to

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exist by the end of the century if nothing is done.

More immediately, Holland told the HPR that “tropical cyclones are more destructive than they would have been without climate change, and the resulting storm surges also more destructive.” Tropical Cyclone Winston in 2016 produced 40-meter waves, and efforts to recover from its damage cost more than one third of Fiji’s GDP. More recently, Typhoon Yutu “all but destroyed” two islands in the Northern Mariana Islands, Tinian and Saipan. Additionally, smaller storms are both more frequent and more destructive.

Coral bleaching, which occurs when warmer sea temperatures cause corals to expel algae that they previously shared a symbiotic relationship with, will also have a major impact on Pacific island countries. Coral reefs protect Pacific islands from the erosive force of Pacific waves, and without them, the ocean could easily erode away these islands. “[They] remove more than 90 percent of the physical energy before waves reach the islands, and that is really, really important,” Holland explained.

FIGHTING THE MONSTER Steps to fight climate change come in two main forms: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation attempts to reduce the volume of carbon dioxide emissions, while adaptation responds to the specific local impacts of climate change on communities. Although many Pacific countries have pledged to move completely to renewable energy, adaptation strategies are coming to the forefront in these countries’ efforts to fight climate change with only limited resources.

A first step in adaptation is building protective structures or otherwise “climate-proofing” existing structures. In the Federated States of Micronesia, for example, the government raised the height of the main coastal road in Kosrae, changed the materials used in the road’s construction, and installed culverts and other drainage measures to reduce the impact of rainstorms and coastal erosion on the road. A project to climate-proof Mangaia harbor in the Cook Islands built a retaining wall to reduce wave action and moved the harbor ramp to a more sheltered location.

In Samoa and Kiribati, authorities are working to improve revegetation efforts and replant mangrove forests to reduce erosion in the first place. Many countries and communities have built seawalls to hold back the ocean, although experts like Nunn have questioned their effectiveness.

To address issues with water salinization and droughts, Pacific countries are taking measures to improve water security as well. As part of the Kiribati Adaptation Program, Kiribati implemented projects to install rainwater tanks and water pumps, improve sanitation, and conserve water in homes and businesses. Other countries are conducting similar projects. The Marshall Islands has worked to expand the capacity of its main reservoir in Majuro, Nauru is expanding the use of solar water purifiers, and Tokelau and Niue are both helping households install rainwater storage tanks and reduce leaking pipes.

Food security can be an issue, especially with flooding, drought, and groundwater salinization all reducing the productivity of crops and the amount of land available to grow them on. If this forces Pacific states to import more food to feed their populations, it could lead to a rise in obesity, as a shift in diets toward Western processed foods has increased the obesity rate in the region. As a result, many countries in the region are at-

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tempting to improve local food security. Fiji is currently working with farmers to improve drainage systems and is researching variants of crops like taro, sweet potatoes, and cassava that can resist both waterlogging and excessive salt levels. Palau recently achieved success in finding three salt-resistant taro varieties.

Additionally, the Solomon Islands trialled permaculture plots on low-lying atolls, which focused on water and soil management and planting crops appropriate to the needs of the local people.

Above all, the Pacific states are working to improve efforts to educate their people about the effects of climate change. Education about the risks of climate change, adaptation strategies, and disaster preparedness forms a key part of Palau’s climate change policy, for instance, while the Global Climate Change Alliance Project in Fiji, which Holland headed, “has supported more than 200 students to complete their degrees in climate change” and “launched a massively open online course that helped educate people about climate change in the Pacific Islands before the Paris Agreement.” It is obvious that more education is needed; Nunn explained to the HPR that “one problem that researchers have is persuading Pacific Islanders to localize the threats of climate change, rather than perceive it as someone else’s problem.”

To do that, they need to credibly engage with the worldview of Pacific Islanders’ local religious communities, which form an integral part of daily life across the Pacific.

“WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME CANOE TOGETHER” Despite their small populations, the Pacific Islands have had a key impact on the global conversation on climate change and the proceedings to inaugurate the Paris Agreement. “They have a long history in the [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] process, and the Paris Agreement process was just one more [step],” said Holland, who helped to negotiate the Paris Agreement. She also played a role in drafting the Suva Declaration, along with the representatives of Fiji, the Marshall Islands, and several other Pacific island states, which “laid the foundation for the High Ambition Coalition” that succeeded in achieving many of its goals for the Paris Agreement, such as climate financing and efforts to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Pacific island efforts to fight for climate change have not stopped with the Paris Conference. Due to its strong advocacy for climate change, Fiji secured the presidency of the 23rd Conference of Parties, in which nations discussed technical measures for implementing the Paris Agreement and launched a process known as the Talanoa dialogue to discuss further action on the subject. In particular, Fiji pushed for — and guaranteed adoption of — the Gender Action Plan, the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ Platform, and the Ocean Pathway Partnership.

In her interview with the HPR, Holland stressed the importance of voices like Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, IKiribati President Anote Tong, Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, and Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga in fighting for climate change outcomes at the international stage and building coalitions with developed countries such as the High Action Coalition. “We’re really all in the same boat together, we’re all in the same canoe together, and it’s really the collective voice of the Pacific Islands and the Pacific island leaders that has been so important in leading the alliance of small

island states. We have been a very strong voice for many years,” Holland continued. “The leadership doesn’t stop with our highest levels. It goes all the way down to the meteorological services and into our communities.”

THE FUTURE OF THE PACIFIC To further help Pacific countries fight climate change, moredeveloped countries need to do more, especially on the mitigation front. Instead of supporting the Pacific with talk, the United States and the European Union need to support the Pacific with financing: adaptation projects — and the inevitable work of relocating communities — cost money, which many Pacific countries lack. Throwing money at governments, however, will not solve the problem by itself. As Nunn told the HPR, the international community needs to “empower local community leaders and church leaders” to help them fight climate change at the local level. More than that, they need to reduce their own carbon emissions to limit global temperature change to 1.5 degrees Celsius and prevent the dire predictions from being realized in the first place.

If the Pacific countries do cease to exist, a new wave of climate refugees may hit a world unprepared for that eventuality.

The 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention does not recognize migrants displaced by climate change or rising sea levels as refugees, which means they do not have the same legal protections accorded to traditional refugees. It was on these grounds that a New Zealand court rejected an I-Kiribati man’s claim for climate change refugee status in 2015. Although New Zealand became the first developed country to create a visa especially for those displaced by climate change, it scrapped the proposal after realizing that Pacific countries only wanted climate refugee status as a last resort. Indeed, Pacific island nations want to preserve their identity and migrate only if it is a planned, coordinated process.

Interestingly enough, Kiribati has purchased a plot of land in Fiji in case rising seas totally obliterate the country, although the I-Kiribati people would rather stay and fight on their own land and only migrate at the absolute last minute.

With Trump serving as the president of the United States, the outlook for the Pacific states is even more pessimistic than it was when the international community adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015. Nevertheless, the Pacific states will continue the important work of mitigation and adaptation and tirelessly advocate for their position on the international stage. In order to avoid sinking, they must. 

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Russia’s Geopolitical Trap

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hen business meets politics, the result may be quite contentious. When international business meets international politics, it can result in geopolitical disarray. Such is the case of Nord Stream 2, a natural-gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany that is owned and operated by Nord Stream AG. According to both Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin, Nord Stream 2 is a purely economic initiative. Yet, the business of two great powers — Germany and Russia — has the potential to profoundly impact the Central European geopolitical scene, challenging the security of many European countries and deepening economic inequality among them.

Nord Stream 2 is not a new operation. The 1,224-kilometer pipeline is planned to be built mostly in parallel with its predecessor, Nord Stream 1, which already connects Russian Vyborg with German Greifswald through the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 2’s objective is to increase the annual capacity of Nord Stream from its current 55 to 110 billion cubic meters, effective beginning in late 2019. As a continuation of the existing pipeline link, Nord Stream 2 may not seem like a substantial change in the European energy infrastructure. Chancellor Merkel claims that the project does not pose a threat to gas diversification in Europe or to Ukraine’s role in gas transit traffic. However, her assurances are not compelling to other states in the region, especially considering Germany’s economic interest in the project.

A WIN-LOSE PROJECT Germany, the biggest natural gas consumer in Europe, has strong business and economic motivations for supporting the project. It will be a step toward realizing the country’s Energiewende decarbonization policy, and also presents an opportunity to become an energy hub for Western Europe. Nord Stream

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Pawel Rybacki

2 is undoubtedly a promising opportunity for cheaper and more secure gas supply for Western consumers, as a direct connection from Russia will mean more independence from the complicated economic and political situation among Germany’s eastern neighbors.

The project is lucrative for both German energy providers and German politicians. For the latter, the initiative not only serves as an undertaking to impress voters, but also as an investment for their future careers. For instance, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has found a new position as the chairman of Rosneft, a Kremlin-owned oil-producing giant, despite it being under sanctions. He also chairs the Nord Stream 2 Shareholders Committee. In an interview with the HPR, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office emphasized that “since the Nord Stream consortium is a private stock company, Germany is not a member of this consortium and does not generate any turnover. The role of German authorities is limited to issuing the construction permits for the parts within German territory.” The spokesperson also added that the imports of Russian energy are not a new phenomenon, as they started in 1973 during the Cold War. While German officials have not necessarily acknowledged the financial benefits of Nord Stream 2, the implicit economic benefits are still transparent.

However, the project does not make economic or strategic sense from the perspective of the European Union. In particular, the bypassing of transit countries in Eastern Europe has both economic and political implications. It may alter the flow of currently existing pipelines in Europe, such as the Yamal-Europe pipeline, whose route through Russia, Belarus, and Poland connects Western Siberia with Germany. It may also change the economics of the proposed Baltic Pipe, which would transfer natural gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland. As a result,

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the differences between prices for German and for other Central European consumers may deepen, a possibility arising from Gazprom’s ability to discriminate between countries in the region. These concerns have become a source of disagreement between German and Polish authorities, and have prompted a multiparty group of German members of Parliament to appeal for European solidarity in an open letter to the German government.

NOT ONLY ECONOMICS The venture also offers more than just economic benefits for Western European countries. While Nord Stream 2 is a joint venture between several international conglomerates — Russian Gazprom, German Wintershall and Uniper, French ENIGIE, Austrian OMV, and British-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell — Gazprom is the sole shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG, the company that will operate the pipeline. This provokes questions about the intentions behind the project; in Russia, the line between private business interests and state policy is not always clearly drawn.

Central-Eastern European and Baltic countries are naturally concerned about growing Russian influence, which may threaten the region’s security, political stability, and economy. They also do not want to see Western Europe dependent on Russia, or let Germany and Russia expand their power as two regional hegemons that act bilaterally in strategic geopolitical decisions affecting Europe. Denmark and Sweden have expressed similar concerns, and also drawn attention to the pipeline’s environmental implications.

Despite these reservations, Sweden has given Nord Stream 2 the necessary permits, leaving Denmark as the last country to grant approval. However, Danish consent may not be absolutely necessary for Nord Stream 2’s success, as Russia is already seeking new routes to avoid Denmark’s territorial waters. In any case, as the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the HPR, “the project has far-reaching consequences for Europe’s energy security and competitiveness of the gas market in the EU,” and the promoters of the gas pipeline “are trying to avoid common market and legal rules.” The Ministry also noted that the European Commission, the European Parliament, and many other EU Member States share the Polish standpoint on the political dimension of this project.

UKRAINE FORLORN Currently, Russia provides Europe with about 30 percent of its natural gas needs, with 40 to 50 percent of that supply transited through Ukraine. Now that Nord Stream 2 will cover Western Europe’s demand for gas independently, Ukraine’s role in gas transport will be marginalized. Therefore, the country will not only lose its revenue from transit fees and pay higher prices for natural gas — about half of Ukraine’s natural gas is supplied

by Gazprom. It may also receive less support from Western European countries in the event of territorial aggression by Russia against Ukraine, as Western European countries reliant on Russian gas may submit to the Kremlin’s pressure. Such countries will be reluctant to take resolute decisions, which challenges European solidarity.

The Kremlin-owned Gazprom has served as a tool to pursue political goals in the past. Thanks to its control over the gas sup-

ply to Ukraine, Russia was able to exert pressure on its western neighbor even before the annexation of Crimea. The tensions between Kiev and Moscow have also resulted in other gas crises necessitating the involvement of the European Union. Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, a Polish-American professor of history at the Institute of World Politics, told the HPR in an interview that the reason Germany does not seem concerned about the potential destabilization is that “Kiev has not much to offer to Berlin.” He continued, “the Ukrainian people can afford Germany’s sophisticated products even less than the Greeks,” as opposed to Russia, “a vast market for German goods.”

Now that Russia is close to becoming a regional monopolist, it will gain even higher revenues from providing gas, which, according to the Polish foreign affairs ministry, “will strengthen Russia’s ability to pursue an aggressive policy.” Furthermore, as the ministry emphasized, Nord Stream 2 “can be used to expand Russia’s ability to increase military presence and activities in the Baltic Sea region, which in turn may affect the freedom of NATO’s operations there.”

Chodakiewicz explained that Germany forfeits its commitment to NATO “because recreating a Bismarckian BerlinMoscow axis is geopolitically more advantageous for Germany,” which wants to “push the United States out” as the “last occupier of Germany after World War II.” The United States, in turn, “has no strategy to speak of; but it does have the tools: its own energy.” Using its power, as Chodakiewicz argued, the United States could potentially support the “Intermarium project,” a proposed geopolitical alliance among Central and Eastern European countries that would promote their political, economic, and cultural integration. Therefore, the pipeline may become a stimulus for a profound change in geopolitical arrangements in the region in the near future.

THINK TWICE Ukraine’s energy crisis earlier this year offers a preview of what may become the new norm. This March, Russia’s Energy Ministry announced termination of contract with Ukraine’s Naftogaz, a decision that would not pose a threat to the European Union. As Russia announced the decision, Ukraine found itself in what Petro Poroshenko, the current Prime Minister of Ukraine, called a critical situation. While the country was ultimately supported by the gas supply from Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, this incident put into question Gazprom’s reliability, which is particularly relevant if Gazprom becomes the major gas supplier to Western Europe.

Consequently, both Eastern and Western Europe have reasons to fear potential challenges to peace and stability from Russian domination in the energy sector. The issue also raises concerns in the United States; President Donald Trump criticized Nord Stream 2 at the U.N. General Assembly as a potential threat to the energy security of Europe and the economic prosperity in Ukraine. Currently, Ukraine’s poor economic performance has led hundreds of thousands of its citizens to emigrate from the country to seek labor opportunities in Poland. They could potentially supply Germany with a cheap workforce if the latter opens its labor market to them. The short-term benefits of Nord Stream 2 for Germany and Russia are undoubted, but the cost borne by their neighbors may start a domino effect on the geopolitics of Central and Eastern Europe. 

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InstaHealth Joseph Winters

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t first glance, my Instagram account and Lee Tilghman’s are not all that different. We are both amateur chefs. We both like to write about our travels. We like to eat new foods and try new products. But while I share my posts with around 500 followers, mostly friends and family, Lee has an ever-growing audience of over 313,000 people, who follow along with her life through her intentional yet effortless Instagram profile.

Since 2014, Tilghman has been the foodie, yogi, and photographer behind “Lee From America.” Technically, Lee From America is a blog and a brand name, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a kind of marketable lifestyle. Photos of oozy egg yolks and body-positive swimsuit selfies offer windows into Tilghman’s picture-perfect life.

Three-hundred and thirteen thousand aspirational followers can’t all be Tilghman. But can they buy a life just like hers?

According to Mediakix.com, an online management platform for social media influencers, the number of sponsored posts on Instagram is projected to reach 32.3 million in 2019 — in 2016, this number was only 9.7 million. And these are only the posts marked by one of the hashtags #ad, #sponsored, #spon, or #sp.

Although many followers take to Instagram seeking answers to their health questions and insecurities, the information of-

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fered can be tainted. The online wellness community, through the filters of social media, has become a tangled web of sponsorships and unverified health claims. Some of the worst offenders are supplements: highly expensive and poorly studied, they can gain popularity when marketed by attractive “influencers” with little experience but large follower counts.

More often than not, Insta idols in the wellness sphere have no hard qualifications for doling out nutritional advice. Their Instagram stories are just that: stories, not dietary guidelines. As a media-obsessed culture, it is time to start acknowledging these limitations.

FROM TONY THE TIGER TO TODAY The origins of influencer marketing may be traced back to as early as the late nineteenth century. Mascots like Quaker and Aunt Jemima turned brands into characters — suddenly, big companies could sell their products through friendly, recognizable faces, overcoming impersonal corporate associations.

As brands realized the power of these invented spokespeople, they dreamed up even friendlier characters like Tony the Tiger or Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Cartoons gained consumers’ trust, and brand loyalty soon followed.

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It did not take long for brands to figure out that celebrities could also serve as product ambassadors. Celebrities already had the trust of their fan bases; an effective brand endorsement could reach millions and easily convert them into new customers.

Today, though, the growth of social media has challenged conventional ideas of celebrity. New waves of Instagram influencers lead relatively normal lives; indeed, by making normalcy photogenic, they have caught the attention of thousands of followers. Never before has happiness seemed so tantalizingly close; rather than emulating pop stars, consumers can find idols who look like them — people who have perfected life as stay-athome moms, college students, and 9-to-5’ers.

Big brands have noticed, too. Companies can pay influencers less per ad than a conventional celebrity, while still reaching thousands of viewers who will see their product in the context of daily life, as an integral part of an accessible role model’s routine. If what separates a normal person’s life from an influencer’s is just a handful of products, the incentive to buy surges.

I’M NOT A DOCTOR, BUT… The main way conventional brands communicate with customers is through packaging. When they make a health claim on their label, though, they must seek evaluation by the FDA, or make it clear that they have not done so. Gaining approval involves submitting a petition and showing “significant scientific agreement among qualified experts that the claim is supported by the totality of publicly available scientific evidence.”

The FDA categorically prohibits some health claims, like anything about the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, or treatment of a disease. But claims that do qualify will go through an evidencebased review system that involves identifying relevant studies, weeding out the ones whose results are insignificant, and evaluating the methods, reliability, and strength of those still remaining. Only after this painstaking process can a brand print alleged benefits on its product packaging.

By contrast, Instagram influencers have no such process.

Jeanette Ogden is an Adidas brand ambassador and the woman behind the incredibly popular Instagram account @shutthekaleup, also known as “STKU.” Her product verification process has significantly lower standards than the FDA’s — “by research I just mean going online and Googling things, random things,” she explained in a “story” on her profile.

Ogden is about to show viewers a medicine cabinet full of her Sun Potion powders and extracts. It is an impressive collection, and considering that a single bottle can cost upwards of $60, her whole apothecary must be worth a small fortune — although it is unclear from the video how many have been provided for free by Sun Potion. Thrown together in varying combinations and mixed into her morning coffee, the extracts are presented

as an essential part of Ogden’s complicated supplement ritual.

She turns the camera back to herself before running through the lineup.

“Before I begin, I want to disclose that I’m not a doctor, not an herbalist, not a potion-ist. I just use them and I wanted to share my experience with them,” Ogden explains to her almost 300,000 followers.

Her collection features ashwagandha herb, pine pollen, chaga (a mushroom extract), chlorella, rhodiola (a root that grows in the Arctic), and about a dozen other powdered substances, packaged in jet black jars and labeled with golden seals. When she gets to lion’s mane, another mushroom extract, Ogden holds it up to her phone camera. “I’m taking it for brain function,” she explains. “Because this girl can use all the help she can get … My mind is always racing, I’m like, ‘What day is it?’”

That is not all lion’s mane can do, apparently. The mushroom’s other alleged benefits include combatting anxiety and stress while boosting mental clarity, concentration, athletic recovery, and balanced mood. Ogden reads these last few properties right off the label. Of course, a constellation of asterisks on the bottle lets you know that “these statements have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

This disclaimer does not make it into Ogden’s video. “Take a half teaspoon every day,” she advises.

In a traditional personal conversation, there’s nothing insidious about sharing anecdotal experiences with health products like this. Word of mouth has always been a major source of brand awareness and loyalty. But even with Ogden’s “not-a-doctor” disclaimer, Instagram has changed the dynamic by providing her with a platform of hundreds of thousands of followers, some of whom take the words of their Insta idols as unquestionable fact.

Take STKU as an example. In a video on her story, the follower announced that she was about to place an order for beef liver capsules, which Ogden had recommended “for reasons like skin, hair, nail, and joint health.” But the precise reasons were immaterial to the follower. “I guess I like beef liver now,” she said, shrugging. “Because STKU takes it.”

NUTRITION: FACT AND FICTION Wellness is highly personal and variable, meaning that what works for one person is not always guaranteed to have universal effectiveness. But there is still a distinction between fact and unfounded belief.

“The bottom line is [that] nutrition is a science, not an opinion,” said Angela Lemond, RD, national spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, in an interview with the HPR. This means nutrition is still subject to the same scientific

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principles as any other field of research. To make any real progress, you must ask questions, form a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and draw reasonable conclusions from the resulting data. Evidence-based nutritionists look to the “gold standard” — a double-blind, randomized, controlled experiment — when evaluating research. That means you give half the population an active treatment and the other half a placebo, and it is only after the study that you reveal who was getting which treatment.

This kind of research is harder to come by than a #sponsored post on Instagram touting the benefits of lion’s mane extract.

But the distinction is highly important; in some cases, inaccurate information can have serious consequences.“At best, it’s going to be a bunch of wasted money. At worst, it can kill somebody,” said Lemond.

Take herbal supplements, for example. According to systematic reviews of the scientific literature, the actual data on these extracts leaves much to be desired. One often-cited study on lion’s mane only showed minor improvements in 30 women’s moods, and they were not even taking it in pill form; instead, they ate mushroom-infused cookies. Another review claimed that the observed anti-depressive effects of lion’s mane may have been “secondary to attenuating menopausal symptoms.”

Some herbs lack any relevant research at all. WebMD goes so far as to say that for the many ailments rhodiola is supposed to cure, “there isn’t enough scientific evidence to determine whether it is effective for any of them.”

As for collagen, Mark Moyad, researcher at the University of Michigan and author of The Supplement Handbook, says that “the science is truly in its infancy.” Plus, many studies of its efficacy have been funded by industry. Conclusive, independent research has yet to surface, but in the meantime, consumers continue to spend millions of dollars every year on ground-up cow hooves, hides, and nerve tissues — not only an unappetizing blend, but a potentially dangerous one, as these animal parts may sponge up heavy metals or carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known commonly as “mad cow disease.”

And then there is the question of how to take herbal extracts.

Ogden’s routine involves dissolving them in coffee with a scoop of “healthy fats,” by which she means butter, ghee, and coconut oil, all of which are still linked to coronary heart disease, despite the dairy industry’s desperate campaign to prove otherwise.

Ogden, Tilghman, and others nod to the inconclusive nature of nutritional research by encouraging viewers to “do your own research” and “decide what’s right for you.” This is better than nothing, but glosses over the complete lack of conclusive information available, and ignores the powerful psychological effect carried by their stamp of approval.

MEET THE INFLUENCERS “I’m incredibly deflated by [this] community right now,” said influencer Jessie May Snyder in an interview with the HPR.

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“They’re being influenced more by brands than by science.”

Snyder runs the Instagram account @jessiemaysnyder. The photos on her page are clean, white, and polished images of her ultra-organized refrigerator and bird’s-eye views into the contents of her Vitamix.

It did not begin this way. At the start, Snyder just wanted wanted a place where she could share her interest in food with friends and family. As Instagram boomed, so did her following. Now, her wealth of recipe ideas, meal prep tips, and tours of farmer’s markets — her overall “food philosophy,” in other words — have made her a de facto wellness authority. At times, this puts Snyder in an uncomfortable position. “It’s a little nerveracking not to be certified,” said Snyder. “I’m not a nutritionist, I didn’t go to school to become a doctor, I’m not an RD,” Snyder admitted. “I’m just someone who’s read a lot.”

To some extent, influencers can be held responsible for the information — or misinformation — they disseminate through their channels. But there are no prerequisites for starting an Instagram account. The world of social media is a noisy place, and viewers have to exercise a certain degree of discretion in who they choose to listen to.

“We should always question what anyone says,” Snyder said.

To her credit, she makes sure to check that the advice offered in her posts is consistent with available evidence-based nutritional studies. Many other influencers agree. But as JJ Beasley of @beazysbites noted in an interview with the HPR, “the spreading of false information is not just in the influencer realm.” The health and nutrition field is notoriously rife with misinformation and bias, and even well-intentioned “research” can yield inaccurate or misleading conclusions.

“Taking everything with a grain of salt is so important,” said Beasley.

#WHATNOW? We follow health and wellness Instagram blogs because they are fun to follow and because they can introduce us to new products, recipes, and wellness strategies. But in an era where doing your own research has come to mean “just going online and Googling things, random things,” it is more important than ever to be skeptical.

Nonexperts like so many of these Instagram influencers can provide anecdotes, but not evidence. As Lemond put it, “science needs to dictate the topic and the claims” rather than personal experience. The idea that Instagram’s guidance will always be useful or accurate is false. Instagram users must recognize the important distinction between opinion and fact when it comes to their social media feeds, especially in the wellness sphere.

“Trendy af” or not, until we know more, it may be prudent to swap our extra scoops of ashwagandha for daily doses of skepticism. 

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MIGRATION MEMORIALIZED THE ART OF THE REFUGEE CRISIS Katie Weiner

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hen the motor failed on the fragile dinghy carrying Sarah Ezzat Mardini, her sister, and 18 other asylum-seekers, Mardini jumped into the Aegean Sea. For more than three hours she swam, guiding the boat toward Greece’s shoreline. In Candace Breitz’ video installation “Love Story,” currently on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Mardini sits in front of a green screen, sharing the story of her journey from Damascus to Berlin, alongside five other refugees.

THE POWER OF A LOVE STORY Their experiences could not appear more varied — we meet, for instance, Shabeena, a transgender woman who left repression and discrimination in Mumbai, José, who was abducted and forced to serve as a child soldier in the Angolan Civil War, and Mamy, who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo after men working on behalf of President Joseph Kabila raided her home and assaulted her in front of her children.

Viewers only hear these testimonies from the refugees themselves, though, after watching them be performed by Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, who play the six refugees as they would fictional characters. Breitz’ installation is a meditation on the politics of visibility, a reminder that we are quick to empathize with harrowing stories of war and violence when they are presented in films, only to turn around and overlook the millions of refugees experiencing suffering more devastating than any fiction writer could invent.

But for Mardini, one of the few refugees lucky enough to receive asylum status in Germany, the journey has not ended.

In September, she was travelling back to Berlin when she was arrested and imprisoned by the Greek Police on charges of espionage and criminal enterprise. In an interview with the HPR, Alex Tarzikhan, one of Mardini’s closest friends and a fellow Syrian, described the arrest. Tarzikhan was dropping Mardini at the airport when they were approached by a group of policemen, who arrested Mardini and took her into custody. “I think it’s been 73 days now, today,” Tarzikhan said. “I would go and visit her in prison during the time that I was still [in Greece].” Now back in Boston, where she is pursuing a joint degree in law and public health, Tarzikhan has continued to fight for her friend’s release: “I’ve been closely monitoring the situation, trying to advocate, raise awareness, [and] start a social media campaign,” she recounted.

Mardini’s story is a complex one — she is, at once, a refugee, an advocate, a swimmer, a prisoner, a friend, a sister, and so much more. Breitz’ exhibit begins to portray this intricacy, offering a reminder that to reduce an individual to their refugee status is to forget their innate humanity and worth. Victimhood is a part of Mardini’s narrative, but it is not her whole story. When Tarzikhan describes Mardini, she is not describing a representative of the refugee experience, but a close friend. She reminisces about meeting Mardini’s family when she visited Germany, and talks about their friend group: four girls, “all best friends.” The beauty of Breitz’ exhibit, for Tarzikhan, is its ability to capture Mardini in her entirety: “When you see the video of Sarah speaking, it’s truly Sarah’s personality … it’s genuine, it’s truly her.”

In the context of the refugee crisis, this is the power of art: to humanize a discourse so often bereft of empathy, to restore

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Ahmed Badr and Mohamed Hafez created Unpacked: Refugee Baggage, an exhibit exploring the power of “home.”

agency and individuality in a conversation dominated by statistics and stereotypes. In the face of reductive political narratives, art can demonstrate the emotion of the refugee experience, making it a crucial tool in the fight against apathy and xenophobia.

A SOURCE OF COMMON GROUND For Ahmed Badr, a young Iraqi refugee and undergraduate at Wesleyan University, the power of art is the power of storytelling. In collaboration with Syrian architect Mohamed Hafez, Badr created “Unpacked: Refugee Baggage,” an exhibit exploring the power of “home.” “I interviewed 10 refugee families, and then Mohamed took those stories and recreated people’s homes in a series of suitcases,” Badr explained in an interview with the HPR. What makes this exhibit special is that it has no agenda.

“You don’t have to think refugees are good or bad, you’re just simply hearing people’s stories of what they’ve learned and what they’ve overcome — I always like to say that it’s hard to argue with someone’s personal experience.”

Brian Sokol, an independent photographer whose work documenting humanitarian crises has been published in TIME, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, echoes Badr’s account of art’s capacity to build common understanding. One of Sokol’s projects, a portraiture exhibit entitled “The Most Important Thing,” features interviews with refugees from the Central African Republic, Sudan, Myanmar, Angola, Mali, and Syria. He asks each refugee to share with him the most important object they brought with them when they fled.

What makes the question powerful is its universality, Sokol explained in an interview with the HPR. “If you were to say, ‘If your house were to burn down, what would you bring with you?,’ anybody would be able to put themselves into those shoes.”

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Asking about the most important thing, Sokol said, “is a vehicle that opens up a space for people to imagine an experience that otherwise they might not be able to, the experience of someone from an unimaginably different background from the majority of the audience.”

BEYOND EMPATHY Art, though, is far from apolitical. The empathy and nuance created when viewers interact with the refugee experience in artistic spaces are important precisely because they have the power to shift political attitudes. This jump, from empathy to action, is a crucial one. Makeda Best, Harvard Art Museums’ photography curator, views artistic engagement as a first step in a longer process of refugee advocacy: “The question with installations is, what is the action that comes out of it? Is it productive to make people feel sorry?”

The hope is that the understanding created by exhibits like “Love Story” does translate into the political sphere, by making viewers less xenophobic and more open-minded. But art can be even more beneficial when it offers its audience an outlet for those feelings. By including information on tangible steps that viewers can take to offer assistance or advocate for refugees, artists can help bridge the gap between feeling and doing.

In the age of media proliferation, translating the emotion created by art into political action may be particularly challenging.

Artists lose control over their work when images enter the public sphere, where they can be manipulated or presented without context. Best explained to the HPR that the biggest challenge in using art to shift discourse is that “the media environment doesn’t have space for nuanced stories.” She hopes to see artists “use their creative energy to figure out ways of getting around

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Brian Sokol is an independent photographer whose work documents humanitarian crises.

this.” That process can take many different forms — “we can talk about photographic literacy, we can talk about creating visual reports for the U.N. that are more sensitive to how refugees are portrayed, this is how we are going to position everyday images in ways that make people think critically about what they are seeing.” Entering spaces beyond the museum walls, then, may be a crucial next step for artists who want to use their work to create change.

WHEN ‘HELP’ HURTS But while artists can challenge stereotypes and assumptions about refugees, they can also reflect and perpetuate them. Artists, just like politicians, journalists, and humanitarian workers, risk exploiting refugees’ stories in the interest of creating a narrative. What makes Breitz, Badr, and Sokol’s work so compelling is each artist’s commitment to centering the perspectives and desires of the refugees with whom they work at every stage of the artistic process. Too often, refugees are treated as passive bystanders in their own lives, and artists who engage without challenging this assumption do a disservice to the refugee communities they intend to represent.

Art is helpful, Badr argued, when artists “give the narratives back to the people that they belong to, and ask how they are taking in their experience and how they’re choosing to express it to the world.” Tarzikhan’s praise for Breitz’s exhibit follows a similar logic: Breitz “really tried to put the refugees in the spotlight, she really makes sure to put them in the forefront and to empower them to participate in whatever it is that she’s trying to do.”

According to Best, artists who place themselves at the center of their projects are perpetuating biases, not helping refugees.

“Photographers in particular tend to operate with the conceit that they have the power to offer something, that they have the power to restore three-dimensionality to refugees, and that’s a problem.” Only by being aware of and addressing “issues of power and access,” Best argued, can photographers “get away from that conceit, and let [refugees] create their own images.”

As an American photographer without any claim to the refugee experience, Sokol understands the importance of being intentional with his work and of never exploiting or minimizing the refugees whose stories he shares. For him, “It’s about getting to know a person and actually building some degree of rapport before you ever take out a camera … you have to familiarize yourself with the context and get to know the individual before you have any right to portray them directly.” Artists who enter refugee communities with a sense of entitlement to deeply personal narratives have the capacity to do more harm than good — Tarzikhan cautions that “when [artists] ask a refugee to relive their experience, there’s always the issue of re-traumatization, and so people need to be skillful and mindful, and to make sure that [the refugees’] voices are truly the ones that are highlighted.”

When artists enter the conversation with compassion and respect, the experience of sharing testimony can be a mutually beneficial one. Conducting interviews for Unpacked, Badr recalled how “sometimes a quarter of the way or halfway through the interview [he would] see someone realize that they have a story to tell and that their story is valid.” This, for Badr, is the beauty of his work — “I really cherish those moments, because there’s this agency that’s realized, and that is so beautiful to witness.” In Sokol’s experience, the interview process “frequently seemed to bring an element of catharsis, as there’s a sense that somebody wants to hear their story, that they’re not just an anonymous figure, that their individual experience matters.” 

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RECLAIMING CULTURE Jordan’s Young Artists

Wyatt Hurt

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hursday nights are a time for celebration in Jordan, as people across the country celebrate the end of the workweek. Their cars blare music, but the beats and lyrics largely sound the same, blending together into a sea of generic pop songs. The streets are devoid of art, instead littered with billboards and unadorned concrete. But the next generation of Jordanians is channeling their frustrations with a stagnant society and struggling economy into reshaping their culture and establishing a thriving art scene that defies the Middle East’s

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conservative traditions. Graffiti artists are shaking cans of spray paint, young Jordanians cheer on rappers at concerts, and the local beatboxing scene draws performers from around the world.

The HPR spoke with three young artists pioneering change in Jordan. Though they come from vastly different backgrounds and practice different crafts, their similarities speak volumes about shifts in thinking among young Jordanians, and serve as a signal of the dramatic social changes that may be on Jordan’s horizon.

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KING OF THE BEAT As he leans back in a booth at Cafe Rumi, smoking a cigarette and enjoying a cup of coffee, it is clear that Abood Aladham is in his element. The 25-year-old jokes with a waiter about his smoking habit, then gives half of the restaurant’s patrons high-fives as he walks to his table. He strikes a distinctive appearance, sporting designer clothing more typical of Brooklyn than Amman.

But it is not just his clothes that set him apart. Aladham is the founder of the Jordan International Beatboxing Championship, an annual competition that has started to put Jordan on the map for the Middle East’s most talented beatboxers.

Before his name became well known on the hip-hop scene, Aladham grew up in Hai Nazzal, a suburb of Jordan’s capital that struggles with poverty and violence. “It’s like Compton, just with no shooting,” he said. “There were a lot of problems with violence and small gangs there. People have no plans for their career or futures. No one is pushing you along.”

Five years ago, after falling in and out with several music groups, he went off on his own, convincing event organizers to let him on their stages. The charm and swagger apparent as he navigated the cafe worked to his advantage — he once talked himself onto a stage at the Amman Summer Festival, and performed in front of 20,000 people.

Soon, Aladham’s ambition expanded beyond his personal career, and in 2014 he raised 450 JD (635 USD) from local contacts to fund the inaugural Jordan International Beatboxing Championship, informally known as “The King of the Beat.”

Aladham selected the top 16 beatboxers in Jordan through elimination rounds, based on strict criteria: originality of beat, technicality, and flow. 250 people showed up to watch the finalists, a large crowd for the local beatboxing movement’s first big event. In recent years, that crowd has swelled to even larger numbers: In 2018, beatboxers from Saudi Arabia and Palestine performed, and two women debuted at the competition in front of an audience of over 400.

“It’s hard to be a hip-hop artist here,” Aladham said. “I hope I can make things a little easier. If I influence someone, they’ll influence someone else and the effect will just become bigger and bigger.”

A CONSERVATIVE CULTURE Laith Al Huseini is the son that most Jordanian parents dream of. The 25-year-old just graduated from medical school at the Jordan University of Science and Technology, and is on track to become a practicing psychiatrist. But he lives a parallel life, in which he is able to share his true passion with the world. When he’s not wearing medical scrubs, Huseini dons a beanie or backward baseball cap and baggy jeans, becoming “Synaptik,” one of Jordan’s most popular rappers.

Like Aladham, Huseini’s love for hip-hop began in internet cafes. “When I was little, I would go to the network shop and all the PCs had a pre-installed playlist. It had Eminem, 50 Cent, some Tupac songs. That was the music we had at the time. I didn’t know what hip-hop was, but I started imitating it and memorizing songs,” he said.

After recording his first album at just 17 years old — when he was still in high school — Huseini’s career took off. In the past year, his YouTube videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, and he performed in Beirut, Palestine, Berlin, and Paris, among other locations, as part of a tour launching his first album. He dreams of being able to quit medicine and become a full-time artist. That dream still feels far-off, but it is closer for him than for most.

Huseini understands that being successful by Jordan’s more conventional standards gives him a leg up with his artistic career. “I think medicine has helped me communicate my message better, because when people hear a rapper, they immediately think ‘poor guy, he failed high school.’ But then I say, ‘I’m a doctor,’ and they have to respect me,” Huseini said.

Huseini’s lyrics are often provocative, evoking controversial topics like religion, feminism, and corruption. It is obvious from listening to his music that he is a native Jordanian — the passion with which he raps about these issues could only come from someone whose life is intertwined with the country’s. His primary motivation in making music is to connect with those who feel unheard in society.

“Communities here have a lot of stories to tell,” he said.

“When middle class and lower-middle-class people in areas that are poor, like East Amman, hear music that tells their stories or stories that they relate to, I think they really appreciate that.”

But telling these stories can be challenging in Jordan’s conservative culture. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to put up with the shaming from this judging community, who won’t help us hip-hop artists, or artists in general,” Aladham said.

He described a scene five years ago which demonstrates the disconnect between relatively progressive artists and their community: During a street performance, Aladham used projection equipment to create light and shadow effects. An older gentleman passing by saw the effects and began shouting, “Haram!” a term which loosely translates to “sin.” Frustrating as these episodes are, the art community is less concerned with what people think of them than with the logistical obstacles preventing them from being able to perform and create art.

“Doing shows in Jordan is more difficult than other places … especially compared to Beirut or Palestine,” Huseini said. “The venue owners don’t accept hip-hop or the crowd of hip-hop, because they’re lower-middle class. They say, ‘It’s going to be all guys from East Amman, they’re going to be rough and troublemakers, we don’t want to do a show for them.’”

A DIPLOMATIC APPROACH As much as Huseini and Aladham have struggled to establish themselves in Jordan’s cultural scene, women face even greater challenges. In recent decades, Jordan has developed a robust legal framework to protect the rights of women. But social stereotypes remain and frequently prevent women from enjoying equal opportunities for employment, education, and marriage; there is little disagreement that Jordan remains a maledominated society. Laila Ajawii is on a mission to change that.

The 29-year old mother, born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp north of Amman, has developed a reputation as a thoughtprovoking street artist, known for her murals depicting powerful

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women and girls. She cuts a striking figure, humble but confident, working in a paint-splattered hijab covered by a respirator.

Though Ajawii’s passion for art dates back to her youth — she began drawing at five years old — her level of raw talent did not become apparent until her time in university, when she began writing, painting, and even producing short films. She won several awards for her work, and in 2014 completed her first mural as part of the Women on Walls program, a feminist art campaign in the Middle East. She learned quickly that diplomacy is key.

“I don’t make myself an enemy of the eye of the community,” said Ajawii. “Even if I have a good idea, but present it in a harsh way, it might be rejected if it doesn’t align with my community.”

The other artists have learned to become expert bridgebuilders as well. Aladham is active in Jordan’s humanitarian sector, working with NGOs and charitable organizations to host hip-hop and beatboxing workshops in refugee camps around Jordan.“What will change the image of this craft is humanitarian events like this,” Aladham said. “People used to shout ‘haram’ at us. But things are getting more positive; now, many of them enjoy it.”

STRUCTURAL BARRIERS Pioneering new art forms is difficult for any artist, but for Ajawii, the challenges have been particularly intense. While pregnant with her son, she was forced to quit painting to avoid inhaling potentially harmful oil paint fumes. Two years ago, she earned a prestigious internship for international artists at an art institute in San Francisco, but her husband’s visa was denied twice, and she decided to decline the opportunity.

“My husband didn’t stop me, but he was a little upset about me going so far away,” she said. “And I didn’t want to feel alone there. Being a mom, I don’t think it will stop me, but it might slow me down at some points. But I’m happy about that, because I feel like I’m giving my son what he needs.”

During the day, Ajawii, who has a degree in Biomedical Physics from the University of Yarmouk, works as a consultant for several NGOs; in the evenings, she paints and writes. She has come to appreciate life in Jordan, particularly as her community in Irbid has grown more accepting of her art.

“Whenever they see me making art, they start calling their friends, and many people offer me a drink and anything that will make you feel better. The more I engage with people around, the more I understand how they think, the more I can make a difference with them.”

While Ajawii began her art career without female role models, she and other female artists are working to ensure that the next generation of Jordanian girls have mentors to help them embrace their talents. Despite her initial worries about what others would think about her work, her community has come come to appreciate both her and her art. Her prescription for fixing things is simple: “The first thing is not telling women that you can’t … every child, boy or girl, has to follow their own path without confining themselves to the gender limits society tells them,” she said.

Aladham and Husseini agree, which is unusual in a culture where catcalling and crude comments about women are everyday occurrences, among well-educated people in powerful positions and lower-class Ammanians alike.

“If you mention feminism here, it’s hard for you,” Aladham

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said. “Women have to put up with a lot. The only solution is for men to be feminists. People in Jordan need to honor what the word means.”

Hard-fought progress has been won in recent years, both in Jordan’s alternative art scene and in society as a whole. Since 2014, 59 laws have been passed promoting gender equality and preventing gender-based violence. The workforce participation rate for females has increased to 13 percent, and more women now attend college than men.

Aladham and Huseini say they have noticed more women and young girls attending their shows after the men there made it clear they would not stand for harassment in any form during their performances. “We had Iftar at the end of Ramadan, and two foreign girls walked by in short, short skirts,” Aladham said. “I was standing with ten beatboxers, and not one of them harassed the girls or even looked at them. I was so happy about that, it’s a sign things are changing.”

Ajawii believes that street art is a particularly powerful way to encourage social change. “A picture is a thousand words.

When you do art on the street, in front of others, you provoke ideas in others. They will talk about it, make changes because of it. People will start to have new ideas.”

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE All of these artists tout their love for Jordan, but ultimately feel that their dreams are too ambitious to be constrained by the conservative country’s borders. All three know their time in Jordan is coming to an end. Aladham, worn down from years of trying to make it in an environment that is largely apathetic to his craft, is moving to Dublin to study either music production or audio engineering. Hussein hopes to quit his day job in medicine and become a full-time rapper. To make that happen, he is moving to Europe, where building a rapping career is easier and far more lucrative. He is less frustrated with the music scene than with Jordanian society as a whole. “It all pisses you off sometimes. All the stuff that’s not supposed to happen. The corruption, unemployment, feeling like there’s no hope and no chance to succeed,” he said. “Everyone is so fixated on getting out of here.”

Ajawii has dreams of living in San Francisco someday, but for now she is remaining in Jordan. As she spoke to the HPR, Ajawii was hard at work packing up her apartment; after being away for nearly a year, her husband was finally moving back to Jordan from Saudi Arabia. The couple was moving to a new apartment in Irbid the next day.

But even as individual artists struggle to create long-terms lives and careers in Jordan, their impact on their communities cannot be understated. As young Jordanians question their identity and the streets of Amman gradually fill with hip-hop and murals, the artistic explosion that these three artists signify is only beginning. “People my age feel like the older generation is very different from them,” Husseini said. “A lot of my generation feels like they’re not like their fathers or grandfathers, but they don’t know who they should be. That’s unknown, but they can relate to this music.” 

INTERVIEWS

PRESIDENT OF PANAMÁ JUAN CARLOS VARELA RODRÍGUEZ with Russell Reed

Juan Carlos Varela Rodríguez is the acting president of Panama, a position he has held since 2014. He also served as president of the Panameñistas — the country’s third largest political party — until 2016.

And as a relatively small, previously colonized nation, what steps are necessary to take to ensure that Panama’s trade agreements are equitable and not exploitative?

Panama has one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. What has made this growth possible?

JCVR: To be able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, you need foreign investment. It is very difficult for a government to just use the taxes from its citizens to solve the problems of the people. So the role that the private sector plays is providing energy, transportation, water facilities, housing. The only way these countries can achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 is to have the right environment for investment.

In Panama, we just integrated a new energy and gas plan — a billion-dollar investment — which was built in 27 months. It was an American company that participated in a very transparent application, and I think that is key.

Juan Carlos Varela Rodríguez: I will say our democracy, foreign investment because we follow the rule of law, and all the different areas of the economy — the expanded Panama Canal, air connectivity, maritime connectivity, and so on. Different areas of the economy have been growing steadily for the past years. But mainly, since we returned to a democratic system in 1990, our economy has been growing. In the last 18 years, when the canal turned to Panamanian hands after the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, we have been able to invest a lot of money in public infrastructure using the resources from the canal to improve the quality of life for people. My government, we have been growing an average of five, five-and-a-half percent. Foreign investment has been very important, strengthening our institutions; it is a very peaceful country and it has become a regional center for many countries. To keep the economy growing, it is very important to have foreign investment, public investment, and private investment. And if those three are going well, then the economy is going well. We have the right environment for investment.

In recognizing its development success, what role do you think Panama plays within the region with countries that have weaker economies?

JCVR: We have been able to receive close to 300,000 to 350,000 immigrants in the past 10 years. So we have been able to take care of our own people, providing basic services — health, education, mass transportation — and at the same time, we have been able to receive close to 350,000 immigrants from other

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countries. We are now working on a bilingual education system; more than 6,000 teachers have been training in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, to prepare our citizens to be responsible citizens of the world.

Sharing best practices is going to be very important, and other countries can see how Panama has done it. Political stability and social peace are two key elements, and especially that the men and women who are involved in politics see politics as a service, not as a business. We need a big wall dividing leaders of business and leaders of the people. So that is our role in the region, to fight against corruption, [to have] transparency and social criteria for public investment, and to provide special protection programs for the people who need it. We must also respect local authorities — no matter what party they belong to, they receive the support of the central government to solve the problems of their communities.

Beyond accepting immigrants, what role do you see Panama playing in countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela where internal political turmoil may threaten regional stability?

JCVR: We need to protect democracy, and democracy is important in those two countries. We need to make sure that the next

elections in Nicaragua are fair elections. The Nicaraguan people who are trying to overthrow the government [are facing serious difficulties]. The government has the army and the police on their side, and they have shown that they are willing to use force against their people, so it is important to promote a dialogue so that they may have a free election.

And in the case of Venezuela, by January 2019 when President Maduro’s term is over, I think we need to promote the dialogue to ensure that they can find a solution to this crisis in peace. two-and-a-half million people from Venezuela have fled their country, and we expect another one-and-a-half to two million to leave next year if the political crisis is not solved. The political crisis became an economic crisis, and now it is a humanitarian crisis. We have received more than 100,000 people from Venezuela in the past six years in my country. Panama is going to play an important role — we are part of the [Lima Group], and we are trying to push for a peaceful solution. It is a very delicate humanitarian case, but the most important change is that the Venezuelan government must understand that there is a serious problem in their country, and that they must be part of the solution and stop being the problem.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

ON THE RADICAL CENTER MITCH LANDRIEU with Bridger Gordon

Mitch Landrieu is the former mayor of New Orleans (2008 – 2018) and author of the 2018 book, In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. He previously served as the lieutenant governor of Louisiana.

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INTERVIEWS

How has being a “red-state” Democrat influenced your perspective on political issues and on finding consensus in a partisan world?

Mitch Landrieu: I was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana twice, [and] my sister [was also elected to state office], so the state is purple and red and blue depending on where you happen to be. I grew up in an environment where you could not get anything done unless you build consensus, and that is just part of what I did as a legislative lieutenant governor. When you are the mayor of a city, you cannot govern based on ideology; you have to do it based on what solutions are to problems, whether they are from the left, the middle, or the right. If you are open and you are entrepreneurial and you are willing to be innovative, the kind of ideological battles they have on the national level really do not exist so much on the local level because the issues are very practical.

As mayor of New Orleans, you worked to remove four Confederate statues in the city. What part of the process — and the controversy that surrounded it — did you find most challenging, and what lessons did you learn from that?

ML: I thought that after the nation had the killings in Charleston, I felt strongly that it was time to address not just the issue of the monuments but why the monuments were put up in the first place. And the issue of race in the country has been a very complicated and difficult [one]. We have not talked well with each other about that. I have said you cannot go around it, you cannot go over it, you cannot go under it: you actually have to go through it.

That very difficult conversation about taking the monuments down started — or at least kind of turbo-charged — the conversation of race that we continue to have through the day. Very painful conversation: it was not an easy one to have. The people of the city of New Orleans were clear that they supported the monuments coming down. We had to, as you know, have a number of public hearings by a number of public bodies that blessed that, then I as the mayor had the executive authority to do it. We were then challenged through a number of different lawsuits, and I think 13 different judges opined about it. We won every one of them. It was the beginning of hopefully a healing process for the city of New Orleans. And as the city gets ready for its 300th anniversary, it sends the right message about what New Orleans really was.

In your 2018 book, In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, you discuss statues as “symbols” that tell “the stories of our past and who we are.” How, then, would you describe who “America” is as a collective identity?

ML: We are having that debate right now, aren’t we? The country is at a point where we have to figure out whether we are a country that believes diversity is a strength or that diversity is a weakness, whether we are stronger together or we are better

apart, whether or not we want to look to the future or look to the past. I happen to think that the very idea of America is pretty simple. Number one, it is an idea — it is not a place. The idea is that we all come to the table of democracy as equals, and that diversity is our calling card and is absolutely our strength. We have always been an optimistic future-looking country, and so the moment that we are having looking backward seems to be antithetical to who we are as a people. And I think that clearly, in a very short period of time, we have come from a country that did not exist to being the most powerful country in the world, the world has ever seen because we look forward not backward.

For me, the answers are pretty clear. It is also clear though that not everyone in America agrees with that, and right now, we seem to be in not only a political battle but a theoretical battle and a practical battle about which one of those ideas is going to win. The future, to me, always wins if we are being wise.

In 2017 during a speech to the United States Conference of Mayors, you said, “In this political climate, we mayors must fight to occupy ‘the radical center,’ where idealism meets reality, and where we put people over politics.” What is that “radical center” and how have you been a part of it?

ML: It is just a bunch of folks who need to find a way to make things work. There are a lot of philosophical issues that we can fight about that can polarize us on the right and the left, and those are all good arguments for people to have. At the end of the day, government and mayors have to make cities work, and we do not have time to have ideological battles. Those battles can inform the direction that we are going, but essentially you either have to find a way or you can make one, to actually make the government work for people, on the ground where they live.

Washington appears to be stuck: cannot pass an infrastructure bill; cannot pass an immigration reform bill; cannot pass any kind of bill. The public cannot wait around while politicians, on behalf of their constituents, just argue.

That “radical center” is a group of people who are practical.

They are Republicans and Democrats. They represent the entire rainbow of government, and their job is to find a way to make things happen. That is the part that I am talking about because I have lived that [over] the last eight years. I have worked with some spectacular [people] who run police departments, have done homeland security, they have also done housing, they have also done homelessness, they have also done feeding individuals, they have also done building and paving of roads and rebuilding sewer systems. Right now, there are 1,400 mayors that represent cities of 30,000 or more: 80 percent of the people in America live in cities. Cities are dependent on rural areas, and rural areas are dependent on cities. We do not even have that divide in our head because we cannot put food on the table if our friends in the rural areas are not producing what they are producing and there are no jobs unless we are doing the work that we are doing. We all work together. Although we have our differences, we find a way to get things done.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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ENDPAPER

SEEING RED: LOVING UNCERTAINTY Ari Berman

I

n the 1999 science fiction film, The Matrix, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. Blue pill: choose security and known happiness. Red pill: choose uncertainty, but knowledge and freedom. Depending on how we feel about the plot of the Matrix, our answer as to which pill we hope Neo chooses varies. However, outside of science fiction and in the reality of Harvard, we constantly face decisions between which pill we ourselves will take. As I look back on my time at Harvard, I see Neo’s dilemma reflected in my own choices, of seminars versus lectures, what internship to take, and ultimately what career I pursue.

I am especially beholden to the blue pill’s promised certainty, which is why it is so surprising that I have started to advocate the opposite; as I started to reflect on my four years at Harvard, I realized that the transformational aspects of my college career were born out of uncertainty. The first time uncertainty governed me was during my first internship after freshman year. I was miserable — my day-to-day was the opposite of what I was told I would do and my boss forgot I even existed. I agonized over whether to quit this job, fearful of the giant question mark of what I would do after handing in notice. Ultimately, driven by the emotional toll of the job, I quit and sent out my resume to any NGO in the area that needed a set of hands. Eventually, I got a job working with refugees. In choosing uncertainty, I fell in love with a career I never expected to work in, and I altered the path of my life.

Harvard, like many other colleges and even the world, is a blue-pill culture. When it comes to choosing jobs and internships, we are tempted by offers made earlier because they are known entities. We feel safer choosing a class that has gotten good reviews over one that has none at all. Personally, as a student, I often found myself planning my shopping period, academic focus, and class schedule around what classes I could

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be assured a spot in. Having traditionally experienced bad luck with lotteries, I chose large, uncapped lecture classes that I was guaranteed to get into. In so doing, the quality of my education suffered: I chose the certainty of a class that did not perhaps align with my interests over a class that truly matched my interested but into which my entry was uncertain. Unfortunately, this phenomena extends beyond me, and beyond Harvard. Humans are biologically hardwired to dislike uncertainty. If, as The Matrix suggests, certainty is a blue pill, then we live our lives in the blue.

Despite Harvard’s blue-pill culture, college is the perfect place to try choosing uncertainty. To be sure, there are risks involved in choosing uncertainty; we may experience failure, disappointment, or regret. But where on earth is there a better place to take risks than college? Keeping to the blue pill culture may even prove more of a risk long-term: if we take the expected and predictable path, we may miss an opportunity that could provide us with greater happiness and fulfillment in life.

Whereas if we learn to love uncertainty, then uncertainty may just love us back.

Certainly, in my experience at Harvard, the moments of greatest value, triumph, and discovery have come from plunging into the unknown: The lotteried class — for which I turned down lecture courses I had guaranteed enrollment in — was the best class I have taken at Harvard. The international internship I accepted without actually knowing where I was going challenged me to become a stronger person. Uncertainty has made my experiences at Harvard truly exceptional, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.

Envisioning my freshman year self, agonizing over course reviews and internship choices, I’d tell myself: Choose the red pill. Choose uncertainty. 

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INTERVIEWS

50 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2018