The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 3

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

FEB 17 2017

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Recovered Files Lynn Tachihara

NEWS 02

Week in X-Files Patrick McMenamin, Chis Packs, and Sam Samore

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Closing Sessions Piper French

METRO

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 03 FEB 17 2017

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Growth vs. Proficiency Marianna McMurdock

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Curb Alert Lisa Borst

ARTS 13

Send in the Clowns Liby Hays

FROM THE EDITORS FEATURES

It’s copy.

The room is disgusting. Beer, sweat, and bodily fluids flow as freely as bad puns for headlines and sappy week in reviews.

250 spelling errors have already been missed (points if you find them all!) Blundstorms and Doc Maartens are ubiquitous. Does it smell weirdly of bleach here?

This is our resignation letter.

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METABOLICS 16

A Pudding Proof Juan Patrick Soto

SCIENCE 07

— RB & STP

Tick Tock Julia Tompkins

Forget Me Not Liz Cory & Anna Xu

OCCULT 11

More Than Meets the Eyeball Robin Manley

TECH 08

Anna Bonesteel & Jonah Max

LITERARY 17

Quick Talk Julia Rosenfeld

EPHEMERA 12

Three Poems Mei Lenehan

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Lisa Borst Jamie Packs

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Foul Comix Jack Lawler

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Cliare Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse Mark Benz

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Charlie Windolf THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

la Johnson

BY

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THE DA VINCI POD

IN THE CUT

SNAKE/MAN

At a time when it looks like so many fundamental American institutions are at risk, perhaps we ought to reinvest in one that seems to have a little more durability: the roadside attraction. Last week off Interstate-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, drivers pulled over in droves, drawn to one of our country’s fallen angels.

Near the highway lay a space capsule with the good ol’ US of A flag on it, trailing a military parachute and with a landing dent in the ground at its base. Whence comes such a failed voyager? And whither goes our dreams of another tomorrow.

Given the American Southwest’s great hospitality to extraterrestrial apparitions, it should come as no surprise that so many drivers “totally thought a spaceship had landed,” as Moshe Teitelbaum told USA Today. But appearances can be deceptive. It turns out that the space capsule was merely an art installation, made by Jack Millard, a local artist. Millard says he saw a rusted cement mixer on the side of the highway while on his way to the Tucson Gem and Bead Fair which through his “artistic eye” was transfigured into “something magical, something mysterious, something that might be from the heavens.” Enlisting the help of some painter friends, Millard made the mixer into a space capsule to join the venerable tradition of American roadside attractions, from California’s Chandelier Drive Thru Tree to Virginia’s Foamhenge (RIP).

But perhaps we ought to follow the money a bit more. To pay the bills, Millard dabbles in acting.

If you take a closer look at his IMDb, you’ll see he played minor roles in both 2009’s Star Trek and the Big Short, as an Enterprise Crew Member and a Lehman Brothers Executive, respectively. And isn’t it always those in the ‘minor roles’ of powerful organizations who we find cropping up to do their dirty work?

A picture instagrammed by the Arizona Department of Public Safety with Millard posing patriotically, hand on heart, next to a ‘Sheriff Lee’ after he had completed “a detailed inspection,” would only seem to confirm some of this correspondent’s suspicions. What better way to disguise an extraterrestrial apparition than through a minor artist, already well versed in the showmanship of power? And what better hiding spot for an extraterrestrial signal than that endurable but most unnoticeable fixture of American life—roadside kitsch? As Millard told the Arizona Republic, it may only be “a glorified yard ornament,” but “it certainly will outlive me.”

Then again, perhaps Millard is just what he claims to be: a local artist trying to briefly distract people from “such a cynical, jaded world.” Maybe we have finally exhausted the horizon of the beyond and should take Millard’s suggestion, returning soberly to the only horizon we have left: the arts.

Amid controversy over newly enforced TSA practices of detaining travelers and demanding passwords to personal email and social network accounts, one woman’s encounter with the TSA appears less like an unjust exercise of power and more like a revelation of a much darker, more sinister federal program.

Last week, at a security checkpoint at Myrtle Beach International Airport in South Carolina, an x-ray scanner detected a full length sword hidden in the “trusty” cane of an 80-year-old woman. “She had no clue it was there,” said TSA spokesman Mark Howell. It’s certainly possible that the sword was unknown, but the political implications of its existence are inescapable. It is no secret that millions of elderly Americans are afraid of losing Social Security and Medi-cane benefits under the new administration, as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan vows to slash federal healthcare and monetary assistance for senior citizens (and the entire population). It appears this citizen was ready to stab those Washington fat cats in the back. O Brutus!

But why would Howell provide cover for this ‘woman’ in the first place? Or should I say, ‘agent’? No wonder news reports omit her name and destination.

But that’s not even the whole story. Howell also let slip that TSA screeners detect hidden cane-swords “a lot, actually.” Therefore, this poor, old secret agent wasn’t a lone actor—she is, as a matter of fact, part of a larger secret governmental complex in which shadow agencies enlist recently retired senior citizens and arm them with swords disguised as canes.

Canes are used for walking. One cane is useful, but, two canes together—co-caine?? CIA involvement in systemic narcotics trafficking is well documented back to the Reagan Administration, but only top agents have been identified; the guts of the organization have never been found. Could the entire drug epidemic in the United States be the result of sinister shuffleboarders with secret swords? How is Social Security even funded anyway? If I may get to the point, it appears to this reporter that the profits secured by elderly secret agents trafficking cocaine are being funneled directly into a slush fund which doles out monthly checks to the participating constituents.

Truly a genius scheme, any way you slice it.

Picture this: you are a secret agent of the United States government working in a nuclear missile base in the Florida Keys thirty years ago. Government policies regarding top secret weapons development begin to change, and you hear that the base is being shut down. You and your three colleagues know that your research, which may or may not involve the discovery of extraterrestrial technologies, will be destroyed.

More pressingly, you fear that your very lives may be in danger. You have become, as they say, a liability.

Where can you turn? You know that no matter where you go, no matter what identities you assume, they will find you, and they will kill you. Suddenly, you remember something from your research, a possible solution. It’s a long shot—extremely dangerous—but what other option do you have?

Now picture something else: an abandoned nuclear missile base in the Florida Keys. The base closed thirty years ago, and the bunkers are now buried in dirt, part of the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. This month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that four pythons who had been living in the abandoned base were captured. The government brought in a group from the Irula tribe in India, who are experts in catching snakes, to track down and apprehend the pythons. Officially, the removal of the pythons was necessary because of the threat they pose to the Florida Keys ecosystem, to which they are an alien species.

Is there some mechanism by which human beings might be capable of turning into snakes? I cannot say. The technology “available” thirty years ago was probably not capable of human-to-serpant metamorphosis. But it’s also impossible to say what kind of non-public technology was being worked with at these nuclear missile bases. Imagine the devastation the US might have been able to wreak upon the Soviet Union with agents who could transform into pythons. And imagine the lengths you might have been driven to if you had invented such a science, only to have your government employers turn against you…

The Palm Beach Post reported that the manager of Crocodile Lake, Jeremy Dixon, thinks that the snakes were attracted to the “tasty black rats” inside the site.

Who among us can say that rats don’t look delicious now and then?

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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McMurdock ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue In the courtyard that joins Classical and Central High Schools off Westminster Street, Classical student and Providence Student Union activist Jayleen Salcedo recalls why she decided to fight for positive change in her schools. “I looked around me and saw myself surrounded by bright, empowered, and inspired students that don’t deserve any less of an education.” Late this January, Salcedo spoke against the approved expansion of Achievement First (AF) in Providence, a nonprofit charter network that currently operates two elementary mayoral academies in Providence. Mayoral academies, unique to RI, are charter schools headed by a board of mayors from students’ cities as opposed to locally elected community members to encourage public accountability.

Mayor Elorza is the chair of AF’s Providence schools, which currently serve approximately 720 students through third grade. In July 2016, the organization proposed a 338 percent expansion to 3,112 students by 2026.

Students, Providence Public School District (PPSD) teachers and school board members, the Providence Teachers Union, and city council member Sam Zurier were among some 200 plus at Central, directly across from the district office, urging Mayor Elorza to listen. Mayor Elorza holds veto power that could prevent district losses of nearly $28 million annually by the time AF reaches its newly increased capacity and attains public per-pupil funding for its newly enrolled students—according to an internal city auditor. Salcedo recognized in front of the crowd of educators and parents that, “only people who are weak minded and short sighted would think that by taking [teaching] away from you they are helping us.”

Achievement First has schools in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In Providence, their two elementary schools are administered by the nonprofit Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA). The initial Achievement First elementary opened in Federal Hill in 2008; its original charter, approved by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), included a maximum enrollment of 920 students for its two elementary schools: AF Providence Mayoral Academy Elementary (which opened in 2013) and AF Iluminar Mayoral Academy. Currently they serve students up to fourth grade, and are growing class years until they

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reach through fifth. According to WPRI, the 2016-2017 budget for AF’s Providence Academy includes $6.6 million from state, city, and federal funding and a remaining $809,000 from private funds.

In early February, Rep. Jeremiah O'Grady, D-Lincoln, sponsored a bill that would ensure the RI Auditor General would responsibly gauge the fiscal impact of charter expansion on the district. O’Grady explained in an interview with the Providence Journal, that he was “struck by [RIDE] Commissioner Ken Wagner's explanation for why RIDE made no attempt to assess the programmatic impact of the expansion on the underlying districts despite a clear statutory obligation to do so.” O’Grady refers to a Senate bill passed last year, which he believes was not explicit enough in protecting expansions without thorough consideration of potential consequences. The 2016 Senate revision to the Rhode Island charter law requires this council to “place substantial weight on the fiscal impact on the city or town.”

Intended to spur a detailed report of the impact of potential charter school expansion, the previous revision made RIDE responsible for the implementation of this task and creation of a report. RIDE’s commissioned study came from the Rhode Island Innovation Policy Lab at Brown University.

According to an analysis from RIFuture’s Tom Hoffman, the report translates learning into projected income, and stated that $24–27 million would theoretically return to the state from a cohort of 2,200 students in the form of students’ future incomes. Hoffman also notes that even if one accepts their methods and rationale, “[the] calculations are derived from a single, early study that overstates the positive achievement effects of AF,” as it used solely New Haven data from 2005–2009. It neither compares multiple cities, states, and grade levels, nor cites the experience of Providence students at all.

Three analysts and the RI Federation of Teachers & Health Professionals opposed the apparent bias of this report; the latter’s Facebook page posted after the decision: “Commissioner Wagner is using a fiscal report

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issued by the RI Innovative Policy Lab at Brown which works in conjunction with Governor Gina Raimondo, a charter supporter, to justify his support for Achievement First expansion.”

It is noteworthy that Brown economics Professor Justine Hastings—known for supporting charters as “school choice” for families who want high-quality education for their children—worked on the report. Hastings has received grants from the Arnold Foundation, a noted supporter of charter schools, and is a member of the governor’s council of economic advisors. +++ Despite the continued insistence by PPSD teachers, the superintendent, and a resolution passed by the Providence school board six weeks before the demonstration at Central, the State Council on Elementary and Secondary Education approved AF’s expansion on December 20, 2016 by a five to three vote. Many, including Providence Teacher Union president Maribeth Calabro, have noted that the council violated state law regarding charter schools by inadequately investigating the fiscal impact that expansion would inevitably have on the district. The one-dimensional study did not consider the needs or voices of the greater Providence community as it lives, breathes, and learns in the current moment.

In an interview in the Providence Journal, economics Professor Leonard Lardaro of University of Rhode Island warned against projecting gains in academic performance in such a “linear way.” To do so, he argues, assumes that test scores and learning growth in elementary school translate into “income gains” in a job market no one has yet seen. Commissioner Wagner nonetheless cited the study as proof of why AF should expand at the hearing before the vote. He also disregarded the poten-

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

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tial annual losses to the city as estimated by Providence internal auditor Mark Clarkin. In speaking with WPRI, Clarkin notes that the district loss could total between $173 million and $179 million by 2027, and afterward experience losses of up to $29 million annually. His analysis factored in the loss of state and city aid from decreased enrollment and the reduced number of teachers that could occur once AF goes full-scale. However, WPRI notes that these estimates do not factor in any increases in school budgeting. This past fiscal year, $363.8 million was allocated to schools within the city of Providence.

The state’s fair funding formula enables per-pupil funding, approximately $14,415 per student annually in Rhode Island, to follow the student to their public school of choice. In practice, money previously budgeted to serve William D’Abate Elementary in Olneyville might follow a student accepting their lottery placement to Achievement First in Federal Hill. Charter school supporters generally consider this valid, particularly since charters are, categorically, public schools serving students without tuition costs. Yet these two types of schools do not have the same types of expenditures in every case. AF serves lower proportions of special needs and refugee students, particularly students who might enroll mid-year, and has the economic resources the district usually does not—including the backing of philanthropists like newly appointed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Commissioner Wagner has not commented on the fact that RIDE never spearheaded an investigation that thoroughly addressed possible fiscal concerns at the district level, or the fact that he views public school students as capital investments. As Jobs with Justice director Mike Araujo of Hope High School ‘88 told the teachers assembled in front of Central High School, “You’re creating ideas in a way that no one else does.

The value we put on it has to be something more than money.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Achievement First attempts to offer a high-quality education to families who may be unable to exercise an often inaccessible form of choice: moving to a “better” district. By opening their lottery to at least one urban and multiple suburban communities and busing students to their school, they intentionally create racial and socioeconomic diversity. In other words, they try to forcibly integrate public school students in a time when housing and school segregation are getting more pronounced.

As Providence school board member and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor Mark Santow recalled to the group outside Central, school segregation still continues. Namely, the use of property taxes as a substantial funding measure for public education systematically underfunds urban districts. Until this system is changed, he believes it “unethical” to expand AF. In a piece for RIFuture, Santow expresses that “when the state is ready to address child poverty, and housing segregation, and our regressive tax system, and a constitutional right to an equal and effective education, and the need for universal pre-K, I’m willing to listen to proposals like this.” In the national context, the NAACP still calls for a moratorium on charter networks.

Federal law and education research have encouraged further integration ever since the federally commissioned Coleman Report in 1964 acknowledged “slight gaps” between achievement among white and Black students. With this in mind, Rhode Island’s mayoral academies are attempting to do what the state has failed to do by permitting continued housing discrimination.

In their mission statement, AF hopes that “by creating the equivalent of an urban public school ‘district,’ their schools can serve as proof that closing the achievement gap is possible at district scale and inspire broader reform.”

In theory, these charters could prove, with quantitative data, that students who are usually expected to underperform can exceed socioeconomically-based expectations. This can “work” according to Achievement First’s test scores, which show more proficiency than rates within traditional PPSD schools. But on a larger scale, equity in education or even equality of educational opportunity is not attainable when integration is not wholescale, when teachers cannot access sustainable pension plans, and when teaching and traditional public

schools are held in low regard nationally and locally. As Josh Antuna, Central student and PSU activist, emphasized this January, luck in the form of the lottery “isn’t the right solution to the ineffectiveness of schools today.”

Central High School teacher and activist Cathy Huang remarked in an interview with the Independent, that the action against AF expansion in January came at a pivotal time in creating a vehicle for social justice. “I think people are beginning to realize this is just bonkers,” said Huang.

“What is the point of education if you’re basing it off income calculation? It completely erases the ethnographic evidence from other AF schools that student’s weren’t happy [and] attrition rates were high. For me it’s really complicated as a teacher, first and foremost, because it’s like how do I ensure that my students get the resources they need? This threatens that directly.” Huang continues to work with Araujo, Zack Mezera of PSU, and the Providence Teachers Union to push back.

On February 14, over one hundred people united against Achievement First’s expansion planned to organize in front of City Hall, but their action was postponed due to weather concerns. “The only thing that’s really worked is teacher power aligned with student power.

There’s so much going on right now politically that I’m grateful we can take a step back,” Huang says, to consider how a coalition can further push against expansion. “I want it to be teachers with families and students, who understand the problem. When you pass something like this so shadily using reports that are so shady to begin with, no one really knows what’s going on. Part of [solving] that is considering how we provide translative or interpretive services so that parents can come to our meetings.”

Even in its ideal, AF aims to economize what should be a right, not a business bargain. Ignoring concerns over AF’s schools, expansion does not address the fact that 14,000 plus students will still be enrolled in PPSD schools—students who won’t experience what RIDE touts as a great education at Achievement First.

Maribeth Calabro, Providence Teacher Union President remarked at Central, “These schools aren’t failing.

What failed was the system. What failed was a governor who put a moratorium on construction for schools. The only way our mayor is going to make us proud is if he vetoes this expansion. We’re not asking for the world, we’re just asking for support.”

MARIANNA MCMURDOCK B’19 encourages you to support PPSD by calling Mayor Elorza’s office at 401.421.2489.

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ATTORNEYS IN GENERAL The Attorney General's role in Civil Rights

BY Piper

French ILLUSTRATIONS BY Isabelle Rea & Anzia Anderson

In 1986, then US Attorney for the southern district of Alabama, Jeff Sessions lost out on a judgeship for the US District Court of the Southern District of Alabama after a number of allegations surfaced that he had made racially charged remarks, including calling the NAACP “Un-American,” and addressing a Black attorney he worked with as “boy.” Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote to Congress that Sessions' appointment would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.” Her letter is widely credited with helping to disrupt his appointment; according to the Washington Post, it became a “crucial part of the argument against Session's confirmation.”

Writing in 1986, Coretta Scott King noted that “[t]he irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods." During Sessions’ confirmation hearing, Democratic senators attempted to bring the letter into play again, hoping that the power of its words would work a second time. This time, when Senator Elizabeth Warren read the letter on the floor, she was silenced by Senate Republicans.

Shortly thereafter, Sessions was confirmed by the US Senate as the 84th Attorney General of the United States.

This retrogression—“too racist for 1986, just racist enough for 2017,” as one viral tweet noted—is reflective of initially successful implementation, and insidious weakening, of consciously anti-racist measures such as school integration and the Voting Rights Act. The struggle for civil rights in America has never been a finished process, and the idea that America is somehow “post-race” and has successfully dealt with its racism, both de jure and de facto, is not only incorrect—it actively contributes to the erosion of what limited progress has been made.

Throughout the 20th century, the attorney general, as head of the U.S. Department of Justice, main legal advisor to the Executive, and chief law enforcement officer of the United States—essentially, America’s head lawyer—has had an intimate degree of control over the creation, direction, and enforcement of civil rights law and policy. Historically, the personal politics of the attorney general have had an enormous impact on their handling of civil rights law; according to their beliefs, they have either made it a hallmark of their tenure to champion key civil rights legislation—or they have worked to undermine it at every turn. +++ Though the position of the attorney general was established by Congress in 1789 under the Judiciary Act, it was only a part-time job for almost a century afterward; Attorneys Generals often entered private practice in order to compensate for their relatively lower federal salary. Only since the creation of the Department of Justice in 1870 has the role of the attorney general in American governance taken on its contemporary, more influential form.

The Department of Justice has two chief responsibilities: the enforcement of the law and the administration of justice in the US—two ostensibly synonymous goals that have at times been woefully misaligned. Amos T. Ackerman, whom President Ulysses S. Grant appointed as the first attorney general to head the department, used his office to prosecute members of the Klu Klux Klan, securing over 600 convictions within a year

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of the DOJ’s creation and dramatically reducing white violence against Black people in the South. George H. Williams, the subsequent AG, continued to aggressively pursue KKK convictions, exhausting his staff’s ability to take on more cases.

In the years since, the Justice Department has not always lived up to its name, frequently functioning as a “recurring partisan battleground,” as the New York Times put it this past January. Appointed in 1961 by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy felt his main task was to advance civil rights across the nation—whether in the South, once he became educated in the realities of life under Jim Crow, or in his very own administration.

During his time as attorney general, he presided over a systematic desegregation of the Kennedy administration itself, and oversaw the strengthening of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which had been created only in 1957. In fact, it was RFK who persuaded President Kennedy to give his historic Civil Rights speech to the nation in 1963.

In 1962, RFK ordered US marshals to Mississippi to escort James Meredith as he integrated the University of Mississippi, making Meredith the school’s first Black student.

He later collaborated with

President Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled Jim Crow laws across the South, gave the Department of Justice the power to sue individual school districts in order to ensure swifter integration, and paved the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act the following year.

The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act successfully achieved their initial goals. Nikole Hannah-Jones, reporting for the New York Times on school desegregation in Brooklyn, writes, “By 1973, 91 percent of black children in the former Confederate and border states attended school with white children.” By 1988, schools were the most integrated they had ever been, and the achievement gap between Black and white students was at its lowest since the statistic was created. According to statistics on the Department of Justice website, by November of the same year, 65 percent of Black Alabama residents were registered to vote, up from a mere 19.3 percent in 1965. In Mississippi, the jump was even more drastic: from 6.7 percent in 1965 to 74.2 percent in 1988. +++ But the progress effected by Robert F. Kennedy and others was already being systematically undone.

Under President Ronald Reagan, Attorney General William French Smith publicly advocated for judicial restraint, criticizing the department’s recent history of judicial activism. Legal scholar Cornell Clayton counters this view in his book The Politics of Justice, writing that on the contrary, “the politicization of Justice Department policy became immediately evident in civil rights litigation.”

In the Supreme Court case Washington vs. Seattle School District (1982), the Justice Department had originally supported the district’s challenge to Washington State’s prohibition of busing programs; under Smith, the Department found itself attempting to dismantle the very position it had been arguing in favor of.

Acting under Smith, the Assistant AG William Bradford Reynolds adopted a “colorblind” approach to civil rights law, leaning on wording from Justice Harlan’s famous dissent in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court case. That case upheld de jure racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine; Harlan, the sole dissenter, wrote in response: “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

Thus Reynolds enacted a policy of “absolute nondiscrimination” with regards to civil rights, explicitly against the race-conscious strategies employed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. These policies did distinguish on the basis of race, but only in order to hasten the day when such a distinction would no longer be necessary. This colorblind logic is still mobilized by conservatives who argue in opposition of race-conscious strategies such as affirmative action and busing today. Think Chief Justice

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John G. Roberts, writing in 2007, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (on another case involving the Seattle School District).

Reagan’s second attorney general, Edwin Meese, took the Department of Justice in an increasingly politicized direction. An extremely controversial figure, (he was forced to resign in 1988) Meese “stepped up the attack on race conscious remedies and other forms of affirmative action,” Clayton writes in Politics of Justice.

He was also intimately involved with the Reagans’ War on Drugs, chairing the National Drug Policy Board and collaborating with Nancy Reagan on her infamous “Just Say No” campaign. +++ In the years following 9/11, both the DOJ's and the nation’s focus turned away from civil rights: Bush’s attorneys general John Ashcroft—who still opposed the desegregation measures that RFK championed—and Alberto Gonzales were hounded by controversies over domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib, and the politicallymotivated dismissal of US attorneys. Still, Ashcroft took the time to drape curtains over a statue of the Spirit of Justice in the DOJ building so that it was blocked from view during televised speeches, in a tellingly symbolic move. Samuel R. Bagenstos, who worked in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ before and after the Bush administration, reports that two thirds of the attorneys working in the Voting section of the division quit, demoralized, during those years.

The Obama Administration’s two attorneys general, both Black, made civil rights a cornerstone of their time in office. Eric Holder, whose office Jeffrey Toobin once described as a “shrine to civil rights,” focused especially on voting rights. Holder has been an outspoken critic of voter identification laws, promising that the Department of Justice would fight “aggressively” to ensure that their constitutionality was questioned; he successfully sued counties that failed to ensure their citizens’ right to vote. In 2012, he drew an explicit connection between new laws in Texas and voter discrimination in the Jim Crow South, saying, “we call those poll taxes.”

Even after the Supreme Court did away with the most crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013—in Shelby County v. Holder—he reacted to the loss by going after states that attempted to violate the Voting Rights Act’s remaining provisions.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Holder also focused on criminal justice during his time as head of the Justice Department. In 2013, he announced a new “Smart on Crime” initiative, which reverses certain harsh sentencing policies, holdovers from the Reagan administration, which disproportionately target people of color. Meanwhile, Assistant AG Tom Perez worked to strengthen the Civil Rights arm of the Justice Department, hiring new talent to replace the attorneys who left during the Bush years. During her brief tenure as AG following Holder’s departure in 2014, Loretta Lynch oversaw the investigation of the Chicago Police Department after the shooting of Laquan McDonald, ultimately identifying his death as part of a larger pattern of racial discrimination and civil rights violation by the department. +++ For most Americans, the Jim Crow South is perhaps the defining example of a time in the nation’s history when the law was not synonymous with justice. Sessions is a relic of this era, as his derogatory, patronizing attitudes toward Black people, resentment of white liberal activists (one of whom he reportedly described as a “disgrace to his race” ), and terrible record on voting rights indicate. Even his full name—Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Third—contains within it a nod to two prominent Confederates, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. Sessions was born in Selma; three-quarters of his township’s residents were Black, and none were registered to vote.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution described him as “a Southern man who stayed on the sidelines during the region’s upheaval in the 1960s and beyond, who expressed little discomfort with the segregated society in which he grew up.” Sessions’s passivity in the face of a major social struggle and transformation happening literally around him speaks volumes in itself.

Sessions has called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive” (to states’ rights, presumably) and used his career to attack and undermine it. He pursued allegations of voter fraud—including one against voting rights advocates in Alabama that stood on such shaky legal footing that a jury dismissed it almost instantaneously. Congressman John Lewis, opposing Sessions’ nomination, stated: “Those who are committed to equal justice in our soci-

ety wonder whether Senator Sessions’ call for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then, when the rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of color.” Lewis was beaten nearly to death, while protesting on Bloody Sunday in 1965, while Sessions attended an all-white high school 30 miles away.

Jim Crow may have been done away with, but its inheritors persist today: mandatory minimum sentencing, mass incarceration, redistricting, and new Voter ID laws. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that Sessions, during his time in the Senate, was “one of few Republican legislators who [did] not support bipartisan efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.”

He has waxed nostalgic for Reagan-era policies such as the “Just Say No” campaign and declared: “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” His views on immigration, an issue that has recently been acknowledged as a civil rights issue, are deeply troubling as well. According to the BBC, Sessions most recently framed immigration by undocumented people as “lawlessness that threatens the public safety” and “pulls down the wages of working Americans.”

In the days leading up to Sessions’ confirmation by the U.S. Senate, the Trump administration delayed two cases—a challenge to a Texas Voter ID law and an attempt to reform the Baltimore Police Department.

Both represented major focuses of the Justice Department under Holder and Lynch; directors of civil rights groups called the delays “astonishing” and “deep grounds for concerns.” This type of legal action paves the way for Sessions to impose his agenda at a time when progress for civil rights in the U.S. feels more tenuous than ever.

PIPER FRENCH B’17 says no to Sessions.

NEWS

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CARING FOR THE DEGENERATING BRAIN Barriers to addressing Alzheimer’s disease in Rhosde Island

Liz Cory and Anna Xu ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

In 1994, former president Ronald Reagan was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory and language impairments that mostly affects the elderly. His public announcement of having the disease ushered in public awareness of Alzheimer’s and increased support for research related to the disease.

Now, Alzheimer’s disease research and advocacy in the United States is progressing—but at too-slow a pace. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the disease took 84,000 lives in 2013. By the year 2050, a new case of the disease is expected to develop every 33 seconds. The current infrastructure to battle the disease is inadequate and costly. Considering America’s increasing age expectancy, the number of cases of Alzheimer’s and the cost of battling it are expected to rise.

Ongoing debates in the research While the biological causes of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s are still vague, the amyloid cascade hypothesis has long been the dominant theory behind its origin. According to the hypothesis, amyloid protein begins to accumulate outside neurons in the brain, forming plaque build-up that the body cannot break down. This plaque eventually results in cell death, and, subsequently, cognitive impairment. According to Rhode Island Hospital neurologist Dr. Brian Ott, however, clinical trials aimed at reducing the plaque show no consistent improvement in cognitive function, indicating that amyloid alone is not the answer.

Other putative biomarkers of Alzheimer’s involve tau, a protein that is thought to stabilize the structure of brain cells but can become defective and tangled in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s. The blood/ brain barrier, essential for protecting the brain from chemicals and pathogens circulating the body, may also be disrupted in patients with Alzheimer’s, resulting in neurodegeneration from environmental factors.

The gene APOE might also increase the likelihood of people developing Alzheimer’s early on.

Although treatments aimed at preventing further neurodegeneration are available for those with Alzheimer’s disease, they do not slow the progression of the disease. Rather, they improve cognitive function to a mild degree in order to ease its symptoms. For neurologist Dr. Lori Daiello, who works in the Rhode Island Hospital’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders Center, the success of these medications seems to vary widely, with patients showing mixed results using these drugs. “It makes you wonder about the heterogeneity that is present in the population that has Alzheimer’s now,” Daiello told the Independent.

While other experimental therapies aimed at delaying the onset of the disease are currently undergoing clinical trials, Dr. Ott suggests that a future direction

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of treating Alzheimer’s is through prevention therapies examining risk factors that focus more on the preclinical phases of the disease.

Recognizing markers of disease earlier allows approaches to treatment to start earlier, since the disease can span decades, with occasional onset in middle age.

“We need to get the word out that people need to participate in prevention research,” Ott told the Independent. Although only 100 people may be needed for clinical trials, thousands will be needed for prevention research. Volunteers can participate in these prevention research studies through the Rhode Island Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry.

Obstacles to care in Rhode Island In the fight to slow—and perhaps stop—Alzheimer’s, it’s clear that advancing research efforts is crucial.

However, allocation of resources for improving access to care and supporting caregivers hasn’t received enough attention. “The custodial care part of Alzheimer’s doesn’t get a lot of press, but it’s often where families need assistance,” Daiello told the Independent.

As patients begin to experience cognitive decline, they need help with daily tasks. Some assisted living homes have specialized programs for people with dementia, which provide a basic level of supervision, social activities, medication management, and help with housekeeping. That said, the average cost of assisted living per month in Rhode island is about $5,300, which makes it inaccessible to much of the state’s elderly population. The average cost of living in Rhode Island for a single adult is about $2,600 per month.

Memory care units within assisted living homes often cost residents extra due to the specialized care they offer. Rhode Island provides a Global Consumer Choice Compact Medicaid Waiver to help subsidize costs for assisted living, however, long waiting lists often more barriers to adequate care. Last year, the Medicaid costs of caring for Rhode Island residents with Alzheimer’s were $415 million.

As the disease progresses, patients need more than just the basic supervision of an assisted living facility.

Assisted living homes are considered “nonmedical,” and they are not licensed to give skilled nursing care, such as administration of IV drugs, which can only be given by registered doctors and nurses. During more advanced stages of dementia, patients often need long-term stays at nursing homes. In a 2008 review of Alzheimer’s related dementia, Daiello and her colleagues reported that “as many as 90 percent of patients with dementia will be institutionalized before death.” However, Medicare, a federally-funded health care program covering citizens aged 65 and up or people with disabilities, doesn’t cover these long-term stays. Medicaid, which offers coverage to low-income individuals deemed eligible under state stipulations, is the only public health insurance program that covers nursing homes. Still, some nursing homes may not accept Medicaid, and sometimes patients will not even be eligible for coverage until they’ve paid a considerable amount out-of-pocket.

Supporting informal caregivers The responsibility of caring for a person with the disease often falls on one of their family members. The Alzheimer’s Association reported that in 2015, “more than 15 million caregivers provided an estimated 18.1 billion hours of unpaid care.” In Rhode Island alone, the estimated value of unpaid caregiver labor last year

was $739 million. Moreover, the association reports that nearly half of caregivers have a household income below $50,000, putting financial stress on families who may not be able to pay for assisted living or nursing home services. Oftentimes, relatives also feel personal obligations to take care of their loved ones and don’t want to place family members in nursing homes. These informal caregivers, over a third of whom are 65 or older, frequently report experiencing significant social isolation and emotional difficulties, such as higher levels of anxiety and depression.

The Rhode Island chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association has taken several steps toward expanding support resources for caregivers. Currently, they sponsor 20 Alzheimer’s-specific support groups for caregivers around the state aimed at acting as an emotional support network and at educating caregivers about the disease. The Rhode Island chapter also sponsors several caregiver education classes that advise participants on the basics of the disease, ways of responding to dementia-related behaviors, legal and financial planning assistance, and self-care practices.

Yet, when asked whether enough was being done in Rhode Island to support caregivers, Daiello was quick to say otherwise. The Rhode Island State Plan on Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders, written by the state’s Long Term Care Coordinating Council, highlights that “for almost all health care and social service professionals in contact with the family, the focus is on the person with Alzheimer’s disease. The caregiver is often an afterthought.” Rhode Island offers some relief to families through respite programs, such as CareBreaks, but the State Plan notes that there isn’t enough public awareness of these programs. Additionally, budget constraints have precluded an increase of respite coverage under the Medicaid Global Waiver.

There are also virtually no options for short-term or emergency respite services, putting caregivers in a bind if their own health needs immediate attention.

Step by step progress According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death, and the only one in the top ten that we currently have no certain way to prevent, slow, or eradicate. Given the projected increase in the number of Alzheimer’s-affected individuals over the next thirty years and the large financial burden on our healthcare system, there is hardly any time to waste in improving efforts to better approach the disease and its societal impact.

Much of the press on Alzheimer’s disease covers the improvement of research—and the commensurate hope to “find a cure.” Yet, finding the way to best allocate money and time for the competing needs of those affected is something that continues to be debated at both the state and national levels. Under the 2011 passage of the National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA), for example, Congress is required to make an annual review of actions being taken to tackle the disease and its widespread effects. Rhode Island is also making strides to care for its elderly residents, but for many Alzheimer’s patients and their families, there are still obstacles to finding proper care.

Caregivers who want to be more involved can attend the Alzheimer’s Association Rhode Island chapter seventh annual Caregiver’s Journey Conference in Warwick, featuring workshops by Alzheimer’s care experts.

LIZ CORY B’18 & ANNA XU B’18 care about Rhode Island’s aging minds.

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

At a moment marked by a stagnant Hollywood—bent on sequeling exhausted superheroes, squeezing the last latent capital from exhausted spinoffs and trite fictions—we find ourselves deprived of their most genius offspring: the UFO. The alien, the extraterrestrial, the UFO it seems has been relegated to the kitsch-riddled hellscapes of CVS checkout counters, plaintext message boards, and measly YouTube communities. Mainstream cinema offers us, at best, glimpses of thebarely-UFO: by way of example, Superman—Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman (2016)—though certainly a flying object (and alien at that), can only ever edge on the unknown, dwelling momentarily in that strange trinity (bird-plane-Superman) before an inevitable unmasking (in Man of Steel, even Lois Lane finds out who Clark Kent is). Even the more faithful UFOs—seen in Arrival (2016) and Prometheus (2012)— are only given to us as contorted renderings of ourselves. Whereas the drama of Arrival is centered around Amy Adams’ ability to communicate with these not-so-strange life forms, Prometheus takes this one step further—arguing that our aliens are really only our ancestors—a little stockier, but still subject to the same all-too-human stupidity and carelessness that sparked our desire for extraterrestrial contact in the first place (Lee Van Cleef’s Dr. Tom Anderson in It Conquered the World).

UFOs come to us as hallucinator y negotiations—sites of feigned yet felt communication between our meager, plastic bodies and the increasingly unthinkable world ouside of us. Onboard the flying saucer, we find space to trip out, hazily sleepwalking into the beyond of the beyond of this extraterrain. And yet this acid daze is not inactive, not inert in its unreality. Rather, it is a space of practical exchange. On the operation table they take our blood, urine, or ejaculate, or sometimes nothing at all—and in return they offer themselves as a scapegoat or pharmakon: clever tale-tellers that both elucidate and excuse our human frailty.

Across our exhausted and polluted skyline, we follow the hyper-accelerating craft away from the complexities of Wall Street trading and the bureaucracy of DC, back to the deserts of Roswell.

Back on earth, the UFO abduction proffers us something more. We, the shut-ins of the world, who have found ourselves stultified “ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidinoeconomic junk circuit,” now eye the greebled underbelly of the alien ship as an escape hatch (Preface to Thirst for Annihilation). A possibility for rekindling feelings of passivity, anxiety, and paranoia as viable political actions. We sit on cat-scratched couches, now comfortably aware that at any point, we could be transported to the landing bay of the flying saucer, instantly flung into the ver y center of intergalactic politics.

At a moment when politics have become so painfully overt that traditional decoding and conspiracy seem insufficient (see Alex Jones’ now mainstream punditry), it’s time to aim our sights a little higher. To be blunt about it, Kremlin influence is no longer enough, we must start considering Gremlin influence. After all, low-brow fascism has long found its outlandish complement and inevitable undoing in the extraterrestrial (The History Channel’s Nazi UFOs, Mussolini’s Triangle UFO investigation).

Reptilian-run Hollywood wants you to believe that the best Martian we can muster is Matt Damon. Do not settle for this.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TECH

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IMPATIENCE Negotiating time in the clinic

BY Julia

Tompkins ILLUSTRATION BY Lillian Xie

In February 2015, seven months before his death, the late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks published an essay in the New York Times on his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. He wrote: “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.”

Medical narratives like Sacks’ are typically thick with mentions of time: days spent in a hospital bed, minutes spent with a doctor, hours in surgery. Life threatening illness forces the patient to reckon with their sense of time, whether or not they can control it, and what they should do with it.

Quantifying time becomes an exercise of willpower. Time does not belong to the patient. In Michael Downing’s Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure, and Bruce Feiler’s The Council of Dads—both memoirs—measuring time becomes a way of thinking about the self. For individuals like Feiler and Downing, time could only be extended through doctors and tests, charts, endless mounds of paperwork. The hope was a cure, in the form of a clear scan, a steadily beating heart, another year.

Losing Time How do you measure time when your future might be sudden death?

On the phone, Michael Downing laughs often.

He speaks to me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he’s at his home working on his next book. As a professor at Tufts, his days now are filled with research, new chapters, and classes, but the prospect of his sudden death is still there—it rests in his genes. Downing’s father was 44 when he collapsed in the bathroom from a massive heart attack. Downing’s brother Gerard was 53 when he collapsed while shoveling the driveway. The potential for death lurks around the family, consistently veiled as anomaly. The potential for sudden death is Downing’s reality, something to be managed, avoided.

In a piece Downing wrote for The Story Within, a collection of essays on genetic diseases, he writes of his brother’s death as the “fulfillment of a tragic legacy.” He, too, is a part of that legacy, along with his remaining seven siblings. When Downing’s nephew Nate, Gerard’s son, was also diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the greatest symptom of which is sudden death, the family anomaly started to look more like an heirloom.

In the spring of 2004, Downing sent his DNA to a lab at Harvard, prompted by his nephew’s diagnosis. He describes his decision to get tested through metaphor: “if your father had died in an exploding car, and your brother had died in an exploding car, you might slow down, pull off the road, and have someone check under the hood.” A nurse from the lab at Harvard called. Downing tested positive for the genetic mutation responsible for the deaths of both his father and brother.

After the discovery of the mutated gene, Downing’s life was linked to the hospital. The medical system possessed the tools to delay his imminent death. That threat created an urgency which made him vulnerable and willing to cede his authority to the hospital. When we speak, he makes sure to differentiate between hospital time and real time: “the exacting sense of time was a big change. [There is] a loss of a kind of adultness.” The hospital keeps a stringent hold over time.

In early June 2008, 44 year old Bruce Feiler, a non-fiction author and memoirist, went in for a routine checkup. His doctor ran a blood test. Feiler’s alkaline-phosphate enzyme levels came back elevated. He went through a series of tests, including an MRI and an x-ray, which revealed a seven-inch cancerous tumor in

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his leg. He was diagnosed with pediatric osteosarcoma, a bone cancer. The narrative of Feiler’s cancer was not one of treatment and remission. Patients with Feiler’s brand of cancer either survive or don't.

The pediatric nature of Feiler’s cancer—rare in adults—immediately put him in touch with his sense of time. “Everyone else I knew was between twelve and twenty,” he tells the me over the phone, fresh out of physical therapy, “my mother wanted to treat me like a child.” Yet the child role wasn’t easy to occupy. Feiler has twin girls, Tybee and Eden. They were three years old when he was diagnosed with a pediatric disease. “It’s very natural for people in their sixties and seventies and eighties to get sick,” he explains. “I was in my forties. I overturned the natural order of time.”

There is no “natural order of time” with illnesses like Feiler’s and Downing’s. Time fluctuates between the clinical and the personal, from hospital time to personal time, family time, surgery time. Yet with an outcome as severe as death, it’s all personal. Time is measured both by the normal—deadlines, birthdays—and the immediate. Sometimes emergency measures are taken to preserve life in the long-term.

Then there are the scheduled procedures, the consultations, and the scans, always the scans, which produce the most visible evidence of time passing. Feiler’s osteosarcoma disrupted his normalcy in its entirety.

Saving Time Downing’s medical history can at best be described as irony—at worst, as a series of near fatal errors. After the discovery of his gene mutation, a cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) was implanted in his chest in July 2004. In addition to the ICD, Downing recounts, the hospital “kindly gave me a staph infection.” The device was removed in early September of the same year, the infection tended to, and soon a new ICD was implanted. The new one stayed in Downing’s chest for three years, until a Wall Street Journal article informed him that the device contained faulty lead wires, known to induce—rather than prevent—heart attacks. It took Downing a year to convince the hospital of their second error, sending weekly electronic transmissions, which demonstrated decay in the device’s lead wires. Downing's doctor performed the fourth surgery on his chest in December 2008, removing the faulty lead and the device which had been originally implanted to prevent sudden death.

In its place, a new device—with the same make of lead wires Downing received in 2004—was implanted. Medical error forced Downing closer to the hospital system.

As a patient, he was linked to the hospital irreversibly. It had the power to save his life, and, unwittingly, to end it.

Control in a clinical setting, Downing soon realized, revolved around whoever controlled the clock. So he pushed back. When doctors wanted to speed things up, he would slow them down. He’d refuse to put his clothes back on until all his questions were answered. Perhaps the urgency he felt in the examination room, and in the diagnosis of HCD more generally, led him to demand the attention he sought. He called his doctors by their first names, resisting the hierarchy established every time their professional title was used, a part of his effort to work against the hospital language. It was, as he emphasizes, “a shift towards two adults in the room.” This he saw as the avoidance of an indoctrination into hospital culture, in which the doctor’s time was more valuable than the patient’s. He did not let his life be measured by the hospital’s order. To his surprise, the doctors and hospital staff he met with were not as resistant as he predicted. Theirs was a hierarchy subject to alteration.

Conscious of his potential for influence in the room, Downing’s desire to avoid patienthood was, ultimately, an act of self-preservation. “My goal was not to have an emotional life based on the terms of the medical world,” he tells me. Here, he doesn’t laugh. “They felt like terms that could alter my medical life forever. One of my principal aims was not to become a patient.”

This demand of presence is not as readily available to others working through similar diagnoses. Often, even recognition as a person, let alone a patient, is an opportunity not afforded to most individuals within a medical setting. This kind of agency often works along lines of race and class. The average patient visit usually lasts under fifteen minutes, and can dip lower in hospital settings which predominantly serve people with marginalized identities.

Downing soon discovered that his understanding of patienthood required constant maintenance. Despite his moments of acting out, his indoctrination occurred on many levels, even in the use of language by the hospital.

After his visits, he’d ask to see his medical record, where he found language that he describes as “remarkably prosecutorial.” The language of the hospital forced him towards a constant state of fault or malady. “The patient denies having a headache,” the record would read. Even this was an assertion of the clinical setting.

Downing thinks about his time, as it pertained to patienthood, often. “I was always on their clock,” he tells me over the phone, referring to the doctors he saw during treatment. He thinks of time as currency, and he notes, “depending on who’s issuing the currency, the value changes.”

“I’m obsessed with time. I’m a southerner, southerners like time. Time is a thing of mine,” Feiler tells me.

There is a narrow window between diagnosis and treatment. This, he assures me, is where time really starts to get to you. Where “you give up control of decision-making, and you give up control of time," he says. "There is a gap. The number one task of the patient in the gap is to make sure you are comfortable with the medical team you have.” He talks about cancer like a packing list, with a personally derived agency not unlike Downing’s.

Don’t head into it without doctors you trust; doctors you have confidence in to make the right choices for you when you can’t make those choices yourself. “I didn’t want to be a hunch referee,” he explains. He didn’t want to delegate each doctor, because he continues, “that is deadly; psychologically it is paralyzing if you don’t have confidence.”

“It’s fundamentally dehumanizing to enter into a medical journey of the magnitude we’re talking about,” Feiler tells me, his voice full of conviction. He wanted to infuse his treatment with humanity, so in the first ten minutes with his doctor, Feiler told him he was a circus clown in college. His doctor, he learned, had worn the mascot costume in college. “Suddenly we had a connection,” Fieler notes, “we weren’t just doctor and patient.”

In the clinical setting, Feiler noticed the passage of time most in his oncologist. While his surgeon and physical therapist saw specific details of his cancer: his leg on the operating table, his attempts to walk, his oncologist saw it all. In nine months of treatment Feiler detected a real change in his oncologist’s demeanor. His distance shrunk in line with Feiler’s prognoses: “About halfway through we detected positive signs about the chemotherapy being effective. Slowly he lowered the mask and became a more real person.” Nurses offer emotional support from the get-go, but doctors take time, Feiler explains. Survival rides on their decisions.

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

Losing time to the medical system was frightening for both Feiler and Downing. Yet getting that time back was similarly daunting, especially for Feiler. He describes the end of his year-long treatment as an “enormous psychological crisis,” as his time became his own again; in a way, “it was comforting to have them tell you what to do every day, every hour of every day.” In a post-illness state, hours of the day reemerged, gifted back into Feiler’s hands. Along with that gift came responsibility.

Despite continued visits to the doctor and the frequent physical therapy he endures in his life post-cancer, the nature of his well-being, both physical and mental, is up to him. He uses his legs the best he can. He walks more slowly now, but he walks.

There is a line Feiler quotes often, from a conversation he had with his surgeon, Dr. John Healy, on the first anniversary of his diagnosis. Feiler asked Healy what advice he would give Feiler’s twin daughters if he died. “Everybody dies,” Healy told him, “but not everybody lives. I want you to live.”

Making Time In the Book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel.

The angel, who might be God, leaves a mark on Jacob’s thigh. Feiler holds onto this story, his own history: “I was wrestling with God basically, and I have a mark on my leg, and it goes from my hip to my ankle.” His time

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in the hospital echoes in his body, the greatest mark of his illness. He carries the physical experience across his skin and in his femur. Forgetting is not an option—not with such a blatant record of damage done, of death surmounted. Feiler puts it this way: “I constantly say to my wife, you forget, I don’t forget. It is physically in my body.”

Downing sees it every time he takes his shirt off.

The ridges of the cardiac device on the left side of his chest, visible beneath the skin. Yet he doesn’t think of it as a piece of the hospital inside him, nor does he think of it as something that is ‘his.’ He describes his relationship to the device “like eyeglasses that are permanently a part of your head.” He doesn’t think of it as something actively saving his life: “it’s never done anything for me.” The device comes to the fore of his consciousness only when he’s forced to think about its space within his body.

The closest doctors get to Downing’s heart now is through a telemetric cardio monitor. He’s part of the hospital record (patient claims to have nausea) but much less a part of the clinical present. He keeps time by the device in his chest. Is it working? Yes? Life goes on.

Feiler still goes in for scans. He could measure his time by them, like dates on his internal calendar, even though it’s been eight years since he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He knows when the appointments are coming, and that in these hours he will hand his time back to the

hospital. He resists, he doesn’t put them in his calendar.

He glides in and out of the big white machine. It tells him, for now, he is safe. His time is still his own.

Downing’s history draws him close to the “terminal nature of time.” In the medical world, he tells me, “the stakes are somehow always ultimately cast as life and death.” This, in turn, has the power to “change the way you value the currency of time. You aren’t going to be issued an unlimited amount of it.” He’s lucky that anomaly was recognized as pattern, that sudden death could be put off. His medical history is a series of control-oriented events. His body holds the power to kill him. He lives.

The hospital nearly killed him. Twice. He holds his time in his chest. This is the thing he will not cede.

Feiler worries he’ll forget, that the lessons he learned during treatment will become buried beneath quotidian stresses. At the same time, he feels like he knows the secret to life, as he puts it: “The balance between short-term sacrifice for long term gain and enjoying yourself along the way.” Feiler’s illness isn’t his past. Not only did it leave a scar, but he still goes in for those routine scans. And then there’s the physical therapy. “I was literally crying in physical therapy an hour ago,” though whether from the pain or the memory, he doesn’t say.

JULIA TOMPKINS B’18 makes time to listen.

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GLASS COFFINS Body Worlds in the twilight of storytelling Robin Manley ILLUSTRATION BY Mithra Krishnan BY

“Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from the mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus.”

-Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment You may have seen it on a pamphlet. The exhibition opens with the image of a human body—its back arched, feet pointed, arms outstretched, head raised, as if it were ascending into the heavens. Yet this angelic body has no skin. Atop a beige panel that spans from floor to ceiling, illuminated from above against the matte black walls, the body adorns a welcome note to the visitor. The panel explains that the exhibit “celebrates the living body in its optimal state—healthy, vibrant, vigorous, and in motion. It presents the leading health concerns of contemporary times, and the causes for these conditions and diseases and ways to prevent or manage them.”

The curators of Body Worlds: Vital, on display at the Providence Convention Center last fall, present real corpses. Arranged and variously contorted, the bodies— isolated organs—and full anatomical systems are preserved through a process called “plastination.” The process dissolves a cadaver’s water and fat content, and replaces them with liquid polymers that allow the body to be arranged and hardened into any position, ready for display.

Since its founding in 1995, Body Worlds has been troubled by legal and ethical controversies over their display of real bodies. The audio-guide for the exhibit, responding directly to such criticisms, compares the exhibit to religious traditions of collecting and displaying human remains and relics: “Many Catholic churches… still have piles of skulls and bones stacked up wall high in their old charnel houses.

Ancient Egyptian mummies are also on public display in many museums, and quite rightly so, since they provide insight into the worldview and religion of an ancient sophisticated culture. The plastinates shown here should be viewed in a similar way—they are intended to advance medical and anatomical research while allowing a broader public to gain an insight into the human body.”

Body Worlds: Vital, however, is different than a tomb or charnel house, and there are important ethical and political questions about the education it provides. By presenting life and death through a detached, anatomical frame, it betrays a rupture in understandings of the body, produced by a shift from storytelling to ‘pure’ information. +++ Entering the exhibit, the visitor passes a series of vibrantly painted torso molds, seemingly made from plaster or ceramic, of nude human bodies of different shapes, sizes, and sexes. The casts are imprecisely detailed, painted in blues, silvers, and golds. As ornaments they lack the anatomical plaques that accompany the remaining objects. They are presented as inconsequential works of art rather than legitimate objects of scientific knowledge. The sign accompanying the casts reads: “Whatever type of body an individual has, the core essential for a functioning body is physical health. While we cannot naturally change the essential structural frame of our body, we can strive for vitality and physical wellbeing.”

The ornamental casts seem to stand for the inessential, experiencing subject that is separate from but dependent upon its anatomical, purportedly universal ‘essence.’

Worldly phenomena are framed as data for the body, the sensory information encountered by a biologically bounded individual, rather than complex stories that require interpretation and might open up new ways of understanding the body.

This biological essentialism is replicated by the types of knowledge foregrounded in the exhibit. By presenting the body through an absolutely anatomical frame, the lived experience of embodiment is bracketed entirely. The visitor is provided a plethora of facts and information about various bodily structures—information that, while interesting, can simply be fitted into a pre-formed conception of the body. There is a marked absence of personal narratives, the kind that might require interpretation or contain counsel for a viewer’s ongoing bodily considerations. As the body is reduced to an anatomical essence, knowledge is stripped of paradoxes and loose ends, presented in neat, ostensibly neutral explanatory frames. This becomes

more true as the visitor progresses through the numerous plastinate displays.

The “Skin Man” display shows the full muscular structure of a man in a triumphant pose, holding his skin—which has been stripped from his body in one piece— out in front. The display dramatizes one of the foundational ideals of the exhibit: that the body can be undressed into neatly isolated elements and microscopically inspected. In the “Totally Expanded Body” display, this microscopic ideal is taken to its limit. One body is separated into all of its constituent elements, perfectly spaced out from one another. According to the audio guide, “this view allows a virtual journey through the body.” The expanded body is a total dissection: every anatomical component of the body revealed, every detail brought to light for inspection by the visitor. The “virtual journey” that this allows might exceed the metaphorical; in this exhibit, the body is virtualized, converted into an informational model that simulates the reality of the figure.

In the “Mat at Leisure” display, the major nerves that stem from the spinal cord are organized as if in a reclined position. The guide explains, “this network with the brain and spinal cord makes up our nervous system and allows swift exchange of information. Each part has its own task: the brain is like a control center, the spinal cord a router, and the nerve fibers form the connecting cables.” This metaphor reduces experience to always already pure data, algorithmically processed rather than worked through and interpreted.

If the exhibit is representative of an increasingly dominant framework for bodily knowledge, then it is essential to understand and interrogate the political stakes of this trend. These plastinate displays can be understood as an expression of the social fetishization of information that devalues wisdom gained through embodied ways of knowing, ones which may never reach a quantifiable end. It attempts a conceptual mastery of the human through the preservation, dissection, display, and illumination of the anatomical. In this absolute paradigm of Body Worlds: Vital, experience is excised from the body, stripped to pure information, eliminating all interpretive space. +++ Death has been removed from the perceptual world of the living. Once a public event, the contemporary medical system has organized death into hospitals, hospices, sanatoria, and morgues. If the dying today are hidden from sight, it seems bizarre that the properly dead are instead trotted out on display. Yet by removing, as much as possible, the biographical information that would lend these bodies any concrete identity, the bodies are abstracted from the event of death. Through a technological necromancy, the bodies are symbolically resurrected. Immobile zombies, they stand in for the biological functions of the living. Rather than providing an opportunity to grapple with death, the bodies in the exhibit—in their presentation as pure information—serve in fact to drive death even further into the shadows.

This social annexation of death poses a potential danger.

In Body Worlds: Vital, as in so many modern spaces, information and data are framed as inherently objective and neutral. This image can and historically has served to mask pernicious political ideologies. Reflecting on understandings of the body in World War II Germany, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno note: “Those who extolled the body in Germany… [saw it] as a mobile mechanism, with its hinged links, the flesh upholstering the skeleton. They manipulate the body, actuating the limbs as if they were already severed. The Jewish tradition instills an aversion to measuring human beings with a yardstick, because the dead are measured—for the coffin.”

Towards the end of the exhibit, a blood-pressure monitor—with clear instructions for visitors who wish to use it—accompanies a display about diet and obesity: a yardstick par excellence. This calculative reduction of life to information, which today conceals the dying even as it exhibits the dead in glass coffins, will not always protect the living. We need more than just anatomical diagrams and biological optimums to care for the health of the body politic. Stories, experiences, and mythologies of the body which generate uncertainty—posing more questions than answers— may perhaps be a vital antidote to this informational paradigm.

ROBIN MANLEY B’18 spent too much time staring at corpses.

OCCULT

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FEBRUARY 17, 2017

Two Poems by Mei Lenehan Warmth of the sun coming in through Ma’s drapes hitting the dark cherry wooden dresser. My ears are tingling. My toes are tingling. My Ma’s cold cold squishy hand squeezes my wrist. I grab Ma’s hand in mine and hold Pa’s hand in the other. Linen cloth over the edge of the dinner table digs into my embraced forearms. Dear Lord, bless us with good fortune equal to that of our labors. Let those that are dear to us be blessed with the same. Let us be patient when we do not receive immediate reward for our good deeds and devotion to love and faith. And if we are to stray, oh lord, give us the clarity to nd our faith again. Thank you for this meal today, and if a day shall come that there is no meal on our table, give us the perspective to appreciate what we do have. Amen.

Sitting on my driveway with a full heart and an empty stomach I watch my neighbors turn off every light in their house.

The house has approximately seven levels of dimness before darkness. When there is no light except from the stars and the occasional plane I wear my shirt around my neck like a bib, the sleeves draping over the front of my body, and lower my back onto the driveway.

I feel such relief in the intensity of the cold—it is a kind of cold that reminds you what it is to have a body.

We walk between our house and our hose on cold concrete back into the garage and sit across from each other at the dark wood circle with four rectangular dark wood legs.

She looks at me with two dark circles and I look at the red mountain ridge at the base of her ngers.

The dexterity of a single nger is more than I need to believe there is something greater.

I dreamt the night before that I would be sitting at a rectangular table in our garage where Dad’s car is usually—Mom stands up abruptly from the table after we nish saying grace and crosses the threshold between the garage and the driveway. She’s upset about something but it’s unclear what. In the dream she is across from me like she is now, and in the dream she won’t look into my eyes, and in the dream her eyes are green and her hair is grey.

One Poem by Tony Soprano

IN DEFENSE OF MY DEAD And why it is hidden (with permission) in an unopened box in a janitor's closet somewhere on campus

BY Mitsy

Albumen

content warning: racism, death, gore

I will tell my story as truthfully as possible. I can in no way justify my actions, but hope that through this detailed account I might better unpack their implications.

It is the story of a seemingly empty absurdist gesture taking on unforeseen political weight. It is the story of art as splurge, art as cargo, and art as burden.

The story of things taken (about 3,037 miles) too far.

Part 1: The Set-Up R stuffed another Taki into his mouth, a tiny crunch registering through my laptop speakers.

“So you’re serious about this clown thing, huh?”

R was multitasking, he was driving, eating, and video chatting with his computer balanced precariously on the dashboard of his car. On the other side of the call, I was tugging at the eye-holes of my sky-blue balaclava, fabric itchy and damp with breath. Bodily comfort had to be compromised to maintain anonymity, in this situation.

“Yes, I’m serious, I think. I mean, I can’t think of anything I would rather have.”

“And what would you do with it?”

“Like, art stuff. I would put it on display. I would make a name for myself.”

Earlier in the conversation, R had given me a digital tour of his Los Angeles residence, whirling his laptop around to show me school photos, thematic wall hangings, family pets, etc. I was surprised by how much I liked him, given that prior to our Skype call, I saw him as something of a cyberbully. He’d heard of me through a mutual friend, and in his summer idyll, started spamming me deadpan post-ironic insults over Facebook. I noticed his post about a scary clown and in an effort to turn his own aesthetics against him, I offered a punk ultimatum: “Buy me this $769, full-size ‘Clown Autopsy’ Halloween prop, or never talk to me again.”

The clown had been in my purview for a few months at that point, since I spotted it in Ghost Ride Productions’ “New for 2016” product gallery. Ghost Ride is one of the biggest names in monstrosities, elevating morbid simulacra to the level of Renaissance artistry. In the ingenuity of their humanoid animatronic rigs (“Kickers,” “Wall Crawlers”), the sheer diversity of customizable finishes (“Acid,” “Frozen,” “Rotten,” et al.), and inventiveness of their product lines (“Butcher Shop,”) Ghost Ride is peerless. With a few clicks, any one of these grotesqueries can be yours.

I purchased “Sons of Wilbur,” my well-loved pile of polyurethane pig entrails, from the site in summer 2015.

“Sons” quickly became a fallback for my video work and provocative fashion styling. It was shot by a friend on 16mm analog film in a dorm shower; another time, strapped to my chest and worn to John Waters’ standup comedy show as a gesture of solidarity. Depending on the context, it could toggle between anthropomorphism and base materiality, trompe l’oeil realism, and unconvincing camp.

The clown was a different matter. While “Sons of Wilbur” exists on the intimate scale of the commodity, the clown was confrontational, human-size. I could imagine him among the morbid dolls, horror props, medical models and automata in Mike Kelley’s 1993 exhibition “The Uncanny.” Kelley describes how, due to their large scale, “the objects displayed maintain their physical presence, (..) hold[ing] their own power in relation to the viewer.” Nothing I fabricated with my own hands had ever tapped into this power. Due to my petite frame, hypochondria and chemical sensitivities, I had thus far avoided producing large-scale work. Instead my ‘art’

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ARTS

was detailed, anemic in its use of materials, with very limited appeal to the fine arts gallery scene. The dead clown could change all that. At the tender age of 20, I might enter the same pantheon as Jeff Koons’ sculptures, decoupling labor from artistic production.

This was, of course, a joke and a fantasy. Ordering a pre-made large-scale art piece was obscenely wasteful, impossible, given my financial situation, and unprecedented even in a privileged environment like Brown.

And unlike a Koons, designed by the artist and actualized by assistants, the piece wasn’t even built to my specifications—authorship issues abounded.

And, plus, it’s no longer 1993, and the uncanny perversion of childhood memories is a dead-on-arrival cliché. It was a joke.

But. But, when I made the punk joke to cyberbully R, the punk joke that only buying a dead clown would excuse his rudeness—his answer was uncanny in a different sense.

“Here is my offer...”

(At the frothing estuary of truth and fiction, the essence of punk lies in actualization).

Part 2: Clown Contract Clown Contract Conditions: 1. Ghost Ride Productions’ Autopsy Clown ($769 plus shipping and handling) will be purchased for Mitsy Albumen by R before the end of the summer break (September 1).

A photograph of Mitsy with the clown will be sent to R to certify that it has arrived.

2. In return, once the clown is received Mitsy agrees to: A. House R for up to 3 nights in Providence after the clown has arrived. He will sleep on the floor, obey dorm policy and make no physical contact with Mitsy. She cannot be expected to entertain him 24/7. He cannot interfere with her schoolwork. If they are seen together, she will say he is her friend from tumblr.

B. Draw one portrait of R based on a photo he provides (8x11 ½, graphite).

C. Shoot an original video, dancing in Times Square to the song “Salad Days” by Mac Demarco. Video will be shot in a single take, and all other creative decisions will be Mitsy’s own. Video length will be the duration of the song. Costume will be humorous and original.

3. No further favors, conditions or stipulations can be tacked onto the contract once it is signed. Parties will treat one another with geniality and human decency throughout the course of the transaction.

And so, with a little bit of pestering, and a few allusions to ‘greatness’ (i.e. clown patronage) as something ‘so rarely thrust upon us,’ I secured a deal with R. I promised him the purchase was just an investment, and that when I was a famous artist, the clown would sell for at least five times his initial contribution. The story of

my acquisition soon became invaluable as a conversation starter, helping me cultivate a reputation of no-holdsbarred fuckery. I was bragging to everyone I knew that, "I actually made a ton of money this summer, just a lot of it is in clown capital.”

When I described the specifics of the contract to my childhood friend—and worse, that I was meeting R in L.A. to complete the transaction—she said she’d have bought me the clown herself, to save me the debasement. The first thought in my head: “Two clowns…”

(And a later thought—Clown Forest).

Part 3: The Arrival My visit with R was delightful, and along with loading clown funds onto Paypal cards, he had given me a scenic tour of LA and a place to stay overnight.

I could have just made away with his money. In this position, Dear Reader—with your pronounced indifference to matters clownish—I’m sure you would have.

But I couldn’t betray R’s trust. The plot was already in motion, and I would have to fulfill my end of the deal.

In the process of placing the order with Ghost Ride, I ran into an overwhelming series of bureaucratic obstacles—missing invoices, extensive cyber-security measures, decalibrated PIN numbers and shipping miscommunications among them.

Throughout this process, I began to question the ethics of my scheme. I wondered what would happen when I unveiled said clown before an audience of peers—would they be physically repulsed? Was shock value alive today? (According to John Waters, it was impossible for my generation to be shocking. When he told the audience this, I heaved with anger behind my pile of pig guts).

But it wasn’t until December, when the clown was shipped out of Washington state—making a cross-country funerary procession like Abraham Lincoln—that I gave the matter any serious thought. Many saw the the election as a dark consequence of our collective hunger for sensationalism, and I was acting as just another decadent. In a new age of collective action, it seemed irresponsible to leverage so much capital into a self-promotional prank.

The clown was dead weight.

Over winter break I told my friends I would return him. I would ship him back, albeit at great ecological expense, and wash my hands of the whole affair. This was the dream.

Back on campus, I would face a stark reality. A six foot five cardboard box was wheeled out from the back of the mail room by an (unknowingly) uncanny valet.

The clown was officially a real object in my possession, among other objects like my desk lamp, my swamp-moss jacket and my S’well bottle.

It was my responsibility, now, to marshal disgust to progressive ends. Working with this imagery would be bit like maneuvering a clown car: too loaded to completely control. But the title and exhibition venue would bear greatly on its perceived meaning—plus I might make modifications, like shrouding the clown or changing his clothes.

I was hopeful. But soon my research opened onto new dimensions of horror—an implicit history of violence inscribed in this explicitly violent piece of kitsch.

Could this clown succeed as a critically-engaged work that testified to the abjection of our current political regime, all without becoming ‘part of the problem’? An answer began to take shape. And the answer was no.

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

CLOWN Part 4: Clownalysis A contemporary artwork is always in dialogue with its predecessors, so I began thinking about works which bore immediate thematic relation to my piece.

Perhaps the most salient example of clowning in performance work is “Clown Torture” by Bruce Nauman—a 1987 four channel video that shows clowns flailing, mewling, throwing fits and taking shits on surveillance footage. The humor of the looping actions is quickly overtaken by horror. The piece serves as a thinly veiled commentary on the artist’s affective labor, living under constant public scrutiny as a contemporary jester figure. If art has been dematerialized, bleeding into life, then the artist is never offstage. They must exhaust themselves, like the manic clown figure, producing novelty after novelty for their bemused audience.

But I hesitate to position the clown as a surrogate figure for myself, given the associations with groups like the Insane Clown Posse and the “Scary Clown Sighting” video craze. Starting around August 2016, reports of evil clowns lurking near parks, schools and other communal spaces began to proliferate.

The phenomenon blew up on social media, sweeping across every state in the US, and leading to an international surge in clown scares. If a clown is now nothing but an anonymous, conformist bully, I bear no personal claim on clowndom.

The clown might read as a martyr, but his cause would be unclear. In a TV procedural, investigators would conclude that his own stupidity, rather than external forces, was the probable cause of death. Until now I have spared you a detailed description of the body, but I will offer you one with a red-alert content warning for gore. The clown is d-e-a-d, with one end of a handkerchief chain coming out of its mouth and the other emerging from a bloody abdominal cavity. In the real-life performance of the trick, the clown gives the illusion of an endless scarf coming from his or her mouth when really the cloth is being pulled from a clenched fist. Ghost Ride’s literalized depiction of the trick as a cloth linkage that the clown both consumes and excretes testifies to the production house’s own politics. They see a simple binary between illusion and fatality. The clown choked trying to do his trick without ‘faking it.’

It almost goes without saying that when there is a body, there is a body politic. With all the shades of uncanny at one’s disposal, there must be a good reason to choose such a direct mode of address as the corpse.

So what are the politics of this clown?

A bit of research into the history of clown aesthetics yielded a horrifying discovery. I had already gleaned that the patches and 5:00 shadow of many clowns mocked the working classes. But I now discovered that the iconic painted mouth and curly wig actually trace back to the racist minstrel show of the 19th century.

Confronted with my own ignorance, I was sick to my stomach. Like a plastic cadaver, the horrors of history never dematerialize—often they just keep their form and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

lose their context. I can learn this lesson many, many times, but the shock is never lessened. It’s awe-inducing how much of the imagery we encounter daily can be traced back to the imposition of oppressive and dehumanizing social hierarchies. How could I acknowledge this painful history and do justice to identity politics when a clown, in any context, reads as parodic? It would be evident that my own critique was mounted after-the fact—a white artist’s save-face, as surface-level as a clown’s makeup.

The clown, who I had once felt affection for, was shaping up to be a bloated effigy of intolerance. Perhaps it could be repurposed for a Trump rally—carried through the streets rather than positioned in the patriarchal austerity of the gallery space.

I was continuously led back to the question: Can we learn to avoid depravity by studying its image? Or are we too captivated—as I was—by the pleasures of the grotesque?

I say all of this having never seen the clown with my own two eyes, having stored it, in an unopened box, in a janitor’s closet on campus, thereby deferring the entire conceptual dilemma.

Part 5: A Parting Note The clown is kind of funny, from an art critic’s standpoint.

In the mistaken conflation of found object art and hyperrealism, I might have created the most allegorical sculpture of all time. It speaks to the clownish pointlessness of artwork in general, and the circus-like nonstop absurdism of art-as-life.

Since I promised R a return on investment, it is a body bound by debt—the missing pound of flesh. The clown demonstrates its own metacriticality. Problematics of form and content, of inside becoming outside, are often figured by theorists as an open wound.

But to frame the clown as wholly metaphoric ignores the fact that death is not just a metaphor. Cruelty, and the history of cruelty is not just a metaphor.

The monster in the closet is very real.

MITSY ALBUMEN '18 invites you to Clownspringa

ARTS

14

CURB ALERT BY

Lisa Borst

Lately, at times when I find the news too overwhelming or upsetting, I’ve been seeking comfort in the “free stuff” section of Providence Craigslist. It’s a great resource, a place to virtually paw through your neighbor’s freaky garbage. It’s also where I got a nice sofa.

Below, I’ve tried to taxonomize a few of my best finds; axes roughly correspond to form (what is the post’s style?) and content (how heartbreaking is it?). A proposed Z-axis might chart the possible risk factor of retrieving each item; in such a schema, an object like the free canoe, pictured at top left, feels particularly sinister. almost...hopeful

poetic typos pleasingly straightforward

METRO

15

utterly devastating

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

SUGAR AND SILK On the history of custard Juan Patrick Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer BY

The Basics The first flan I ever ate was served with a glass of Pepsi. The grown-ups had coffee and my aunt, who made it, probably had a cigarette, too, as I would learn after her death. I was not prepared. Wobbly and biological, the flan revealed pale flesh under its caramel tan. In memory, it is huge. In actuality, it was likely no bigger than the standard cake pan in which it was baked, nine inches in diameter.

I remember kneeling on a kitchen stool to get a closer look at the custard on the counter. It was a hot day and the flan was cool. It sweat.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t want to take a bite.

The first time I ever made flan, an incident involving salt (too much of it) led to my custard’s demise.

Unaware of what was to come, I felt hopeful when it was time to pull the pan out of the oven. The custard looked like flan and it wobbled like flan. Unmolded, it could have been a stock photo, but you couldn’t really eat it. Though it was certainly custard, it tasted more of salt than sugar and its existence was short-lived: post-taste test, it became trash.

Custards, in their essential form, taste like what they are, nothing else.

Their chemistry is specific, unparalleled, irreversible, and, as I can attest, easily unbalanced. This is their appeal.

What constitutes a custard? This question has a chemical answer and it’s involved. The key ingredient is egg. Beyond that, the chemistry requires only liquid, some of which must be water, and dissolved minerals (salt is traditional). From the gustatory position, you’ll want milk and sugar, too, if sweet is your goal. The ratio between ingredients is where the finesse comes in.

An accomplished custard is as delicate as it is delicious (‘silky’ is the typical adjective used).

Fats, carbs, proteins, water, and salt: it might seem that you can’t go wrong. The devil, here, is not so much in the details as it is in the proteins. The first thing to know about proteins is that they are complex and easily upset by the application of heat. They have a tendency to snarl and get all wound up, or else to unfold and cling to each other. A custard needs just the right kind of treatment to achieve its ideal consistency.

Too much heat leads to ruin: a rubber-like texture. But too tepid a heat will leave you with an undercooked soup, a desirable outcome only for sabayon.

You can’t be timid, you must be slow. Sugar is helpful. As heat denatures the proteins in the eggs, their architecture falls apart. Slow heat prevents the denatured proteins from clinging to each other too hard, too fast. Sugar gets in their way to the same effect. And there are other methods, of course. A water bath for a baked custard limits heat transfer in the way that water can be relied on to do—its boiling point serving as a road block for the heat. A double boiler transposes this method to the stovetop. Equally good is stirring over low heat with care, unless care is asking too much of the cook.

Canned milk and more The custard in Key lime pie is foolproof. Made with egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk, and the juice of Key limes (or not, as the case may be, seeing as any lime juice will do), the filling of a Key lime pie does not

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

different from consumption, and in the case of Key lime pie, let there be no doubt which counts.

need any heat. Stirred, it will thicken of its own accord.

The acid in the lime juice denatures another set of proteins—in the condensed milk, this time—causing the filling to thicken. No sugar is added as no more is needed (condensed milk is full of wonders). Some salt may be welcome. Eggs are ancillary.

Invented in 1853, sweetened condensed milk has long been a problem solver. The story goes that a dearth of fresh milk on a transatlantic voyage spurred its creation. Without pasteurization, fresh milk doesn’t last. Gently heated, with sugar added to fox bacterial growth, sweetened condensed milk has no such restrictions. Any expiration date is a suggestion, not a condemnation.

Today it’s just another commodity, an unhealthy one that’s spurred low- and no-fat versions. But once, condensed milk was a wonder that was even adopted as rations by Union forces during the Civil War. More decadent than any modern day MRE (meal readyto-eat), the military’s high energy equivalent of a Lunchable, a single can contains easily more than one thousand calories, making it wholesome by wartime metrics. Its connection to soldiering gives a sense of the stakes of condensed milk (they’re high). A means of survival, it stabilizes both diets and pies.

In a custard, sweetened condensed milk adds the legacy of its consumption: its usefulness for health and for war, for longevity, for being a quick fix. Incidentally, the easiest way to make dulce de leche is to cheat: boil a can of condensed milk for a few hours. (The only downside is the risk of explosion.) A Key lime pie is no uncomplicated thing: it’s a tasty iteration of a nineteenth century canned commodity. The convenience in the custard is bound up in bonds more complex than chemical ones. Yellow, zesty, and cool, Key lime pie is a custard with a demonstrable history. Eating a slice, you consume a thing more subtle than its graham cracker crust would suggest. Only in comparison to a less sweet custard reveals the taste of canned convenience that comes of storing milk in sugar. Comparison, though, is

Imitations What’s a custard without eggs? As atoms are to matter, so are eggs to dessert. They are the seeds of things, generative and essential. Without matter, void; without eggs, pudding.

Only in Britain is a pudding a custard (and there, a pudding can be seemingly anything).

Pudding is perhaps the most convenient custard there is. A small box yields a paper packet from which the powder is poured into a pot. Add milk, heat, and stir. Cool.

What comes out—unless you take issue with the thin film of coagulated milk proteins that tends to form on top of pudding—is perfect. Smooth, viscous, and sweet, boxed pudding may also taste of modernity and labor saved if you’ve already had the experience of making a proper custard. Originally a clever fix to the problem of egg-allergies (specifically those of Elizabeth Bird, whose husband, Alfred, invented boxed pudding for her), it has been reproduced in households all over and has since lost the context of the problem it was designed to solve. More recent ‘homemade’ puddings call for eggs, for cream, for the whole nine yards.

The point is lost. The final product becomes a custard adulterated with cornstarch and thus blunted in flavor.

Chocolate pudding is best. Other varieties are pale imitations. Without cocoa powder, a suspension of sugar in swollen starch granules is no one’s friend. Where chocolate pudding is decadent and homey in the same bite, other puddings serve up weak flavors better suited to more delicate entities like the custard. Consider: vanilla pudding is just a heap of cornstarch and sugar with only (likely imitation) vanilla to give it a reason for being. Weak tea, indeed.

It is said that the proof is in the pudding because it is so. Put a custard to the test: if you can walk on it, it is surely pudding (google it). Miraculous though this may seem, pudding is merely a non-Newtonian fluid (at least until it’s well-cooked, anyway). Oobleck plus sugar, it can solidify with the application of force.

Custard is less terrestrial. If it supports your weight, there’s a problem.

Flan, again The last flan I ate was a flan de coco, a Puerto Rican custard made with coconut milk, hence the name, as well as some combination of condensed, evaporated, or fresh milk. I was at a different aunt’s house and there was no Pepsi. I had coffee, which is to say that I was no longer quite a child. I was large and the flan was tiny, baked in a disposable aluminum pan. My portion was a rectangular prism no greater than half a cup in volume.

There were no seconds. What remained went back in the fridge, the better to savor it. I don’t know what happened to the rest.

JUAN PATRICK SOTO B’17 is letting it set.

METABOLICS

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QUICK TALK Julia Rosenfeld ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel BY

this is the big jump this is when we go running like quick talk through telephone lines we sense heat spreading on bowed surfaces we are chrome we are wire tight wait all quiet — bracing for rush and then flint strikes fire we flash now we’re zipping, blurs our atoms in flux together we build up a swell and we surge there is no slow as long as we’re stirring how much can we say in second-long summits? one emits verve two absorbs it three lets out love— four imbibes it glints fleeting molecules seeking contact in entropy this slim alive

LITERARY

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FEBRUARY 17, 2017

funny page’s

2 4

2 4

F E B . 1 7

– F E B .

– F E B .

F E B . 1 7

FRIDAY, 2/17

SUNDAY, 2/19

TUESDAY, 2/21

Stargazing at Frosty Drew Observatory Charlestown, RI / 5:30 - 11:30 This sounds very cute and romantic! Space is the place!

PWR BTTM w/ Mal Blum Columbus Theatre / 8pm / Sold out PWR BTTM is nice, but one time I saw an extremely hot person sing a cover of a Mal Blum song at someone’s backyard concert and really fell head over heels. If you’re out there, Mal Blum cover performer, consider this a missed connection and please email me at listtheindy@gmail.com.

Showing Up for Racial Justice monthly meeting Location TBA / 7pm SURJ is a great organization which works to mobilize white people against violence targeting Black people, immigrants, Muslims, and other folks increasingly targeted by bigotry condoned by our 45th President. If you’re a white person, the very least you could do is show up. This group, and the solidarity that they stand for, is way more than that.

Fetish Flea Market Crowne Plaza (Airport), Warwick Billed as “the largest and lowest-cost event for the BDSM Community in New England bringing thousands of participants together with vendors from all over the U.S. and Canada and introductory classes from local, national, and international presenters to suit just about any taste.” It is admittedly difficult to imagine this happening at TF Green Airport, but you know what they say: Warwick gets me off!

SATURDAY, 2/18 Colonial Food for Thought Colony House, Newport, RI / 10am-1pm “The logics of desire and consumption in (post)colonial circuits reveal the carnal processes through which our bodies are materialized as queer, through which they are racialized,” writes Kyla Wazana Tompkins for GLQ. This event sounds more like a reenactment that will focus on what soldiers ate during the revolutionary war. The website urges you to “try your hand at a colonial-inspired stamping craft!” :/

Providence Modular Meet-Up/Synth Petting Zoo/ Show&Sale @ Aurora 5pm (shows start at 9) / $6 after 9 This is a friendly “meet-up” of PVD electronic music enthusiasts and not a real petting zoo. This may seem disappointing but we’re actually pretty thankful. Who likes getting fenced in with nature and being socially obligated to touch it? Petting a synth might be a calmer alternative, but we’re making no promises.

MONDAY, 2/20 Scrabble Night Julian’s, 312 Broadway / 7pm One time I went to Julian’s on a Sunday and really lived the dream of a mimosa-soaked brunch à la Sex in the City. This is not supposed to be a Julian’s ad, all I’m saying is that Miranda would win a Scrabble tournie any day, and not just because she’s a lawyer.

THURSDAY, 2/23 Sex Trivia Night The Salon, 57 Eddy St. / 8pm / Free Now that we’re past the Valentine’s Day zeitgeist, you may be thinking, hey, isn’t sex kind of trivial now? And according to this “saucier type of trivia night” hosted by PVD’s Center for Sexual Pleasure, you would be right. Practice asking about your partner’s preferences by answering in the form of a question.

Anti-Fascist Cinema #1: Germany in Autumn Cable Car Cinema and Cafe / 7:30 / $10 This screening will be the first of an unfortunately timely series. If you’re put off by the cover charge, know that proceeds go toward a local immigrants rights organization (unspecified) and toward Brown University graduate student unionization efforts.