The College Hill Independent Vol. 37 Issue 7

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Garter Snake (2018) by Nicole Cochary [Brown].

Oil on canvas.

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

09 NOV 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 07

FROM THE EDITORS Cover Art

Nicole Cochary NEWS

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Week in Puppets Ella Comberg, Alina Kullman

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Small Victories Mara Dolan, Lucas Smolcic Larson, Paula Pacheco Soto

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Go to Class Jessica Murphy METRO

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Teaching the Teacher Dylan Lewis

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Not a Wave, but a Ripple Cashen Conroy ARTS

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Becoming the Cowboy Iman Husain FEATURES

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No CAP Wen Zhuang SCIENCE & TECH

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Dating Trouble Angie Kim

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Deep State, Deeper Fake Mina Rhee CLIMATE

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Freak Out! Harry August, Ella Comberg, Julia Rock LITERARY

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We check the news: Democrats win the House, Republicans win the Senate.

All of this—the sleepless nights angry at the evening news, the realization that we are hooked, that we need more (maybe even convinced that the Democrats really have changed, this time)—for one increasingly meagre sentence. This endless cycle of political speculation only naturalizes what we cannot accept: that this means everything. It may now be impossible to separate life from national politics, but, if we learned anything on Tuesday, it’s that elections don’t make a life.

For many, however, this separation was never possible. A call to arms against voter suppression in Georgia, and the enfranchisement of over a million people with felonies in Florida, might feel like the slow realization of a democratic ideal, but these victories are as partial as they are necessary.

Those whose lives have been the most politicized are also those for whom democracy has rarely occurred: refugees, the incarcerated, those whose gender identities might be written out of law. As Nancy Pelosi gleefully rushes to establish “a bipartisan marketplace of ideas” as if she’s ringing the Nasdaq bell, we might remind her that our votes are not a mandate for the same old world. They are, rather, a reckoning with what we should do with what this world has left in its wake, those lives made expendable in democracy’s name. Our votes are not a sign of freedom, but of responsibility. They are not a gift, but a debt.

—CP & WW

Three Poems Bria Metzger EPHEMERA

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Mini Indy Nicole Cochary, Claire Schlaikjer

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Part 1 // M. & T. visit Attleboro // A series.

Maria, Theia

WEEK IN REVIEW Sara Van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg

ARTS Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman

FEATURES Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer

BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner

X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman

09 NOV 2018

VOL 37 ISSUE 07

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

X 18

MISSION STATEMENT

LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly WRITERS Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Kayli Wren COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim

ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva Alex Westfall ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea

DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West MVP Christie Zhong

WEB Ashley Kim

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WEEK IN PUPPETS

BY Ella Comberg, Alina Kulman DESIGN Amos Jackson DANCE LIKE NOBODY'S WATCHING “This is interpretive dance—also known as Mooch Moves—for my time in the White House.”

Last Monday, the New York Post published a video of the former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci doing a dramatic retelling—in dance!—of his tumultuous ten-day tenure in the White House in July, 2017. Although one year later, standing in front of a white background at the Post’s studios in a well-tailored blue blazer and just-casual-enough black sneakers, he insists that he had the job for eleven days, not ten. Either way, he was fired on July 31st for insulting other members of the White House, in an attempt by Chief of Staff John Kelly to return some semblance of order to the Trump Administration.

In the video, Scaramucci does a different dance move for each of the eleven (ten?) days of his stint as Communications Director. Day One, he says to the camera, was “Mooch cleaning house.” He makes some terribly awkward sweeping and dusting motions over the cheery electronic harpsichord music in the background. Day Four: “I’m with the Boy Scouts,” he says with a salute, referring to his visit with Trump to the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia. “My son is born, I’m missing that,” he continues, rocking an imaginary baby and drawing a single tear from his eye with his finger. “That’s a very big bummer for me.” Big bummer, indeed. According to Page Six reporting, he texted his wife, “Congratulations, I’ll pray for our child," after her delivery, clearly exuding the simultaneous excitement and distress of a man missing the birth of his son.

“The Mooch” (as he likes to call himself ) has previously tried to claim that he’s uninterested in media attention. In the now-infamous interview with the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on Day Five—the conversation that got him fired—Scaramucci said he was different from the attention-craving Steve Bannon because he was, well, not trying to suck on his own genitalia. But Scaramucci’s bizarre dance stunt, along with appearances on every major TV news outlet, are all part of the press tour for his new book, Trump: The Blue Collar President. In the book, he praises Trump for showing him the plight of the American middle class, because Trump has clearly shown us how getting “a small loan of a million dollars” (or more, per recent New York Times reporting) from your father, and not paying your contractors could put any billionaire real estate developer deeply in touch with the working man.

Scaramucci has joined the ranks of other former Trump officials who, after leaving the White House,

now claim to be in on the joke. In a surprise appearance at last year’s Emmys, Scaramucci’s predecessor, Sean Spicer, announced to the cheers of the crowd that “this will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period.” Omarosa Manigault Newman, former director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, went on Colbert in March, and laughed about the doublespeak of calling Trump’s support for white supremacists after Charlottesville “racial, not racist.”

These officials feel they have license to lie while in office, but once they leave, they can assure everyone that they never really meant what they were saying.

As for Scaramucci, he’s still an outspoken supporter of the Trump administration and its policies. But doing these kinds of videos and media appearances gives his message of support enough of a wink and a nudge to ensure wealthy New York finance-types will still come to his book party.

To represent the end of his time in the White House, Scaramucci for Day Twelve (which was, in reality, Day Eleven) gets down on one knee and puts his hands in a prayer position. “Thank you God that it’s over,” he says, almost somberly. Hopefully, two Novembers from now we’ll all be saying the same thing.

-AK GRITTY IS NOT A WORKER When I opened Twitter one day in late September and learned of Gritty’s debut, it felt like the first piece of good news in weeks. Some intern at the Philadelphia Flyers, it seemed, had pitched a nonsensical new mascot for the city’s hockey team and, with presumably no better options, the higher-ups at the Flyers gave Gritty the stamp of approval.

To me, lying in bed that morning, Gritty was nothing more than a big orange guy who didn’t look like he’d been okayed by a focus-group. There’s no premise or gimmick to him: he’s got orange fur and hair, bulbous googly eyes, a hockey jersey and helmet, and a pearshaped figure uncannily similar to that of the Phanatic, the Phillies’ mascot. He’s dressed like a hockey player, but really, he just looks like a red-bearded hockey fan pounding buds in the back row of the Wells Fargo Center. Indeed, Gritty felt like someone I knew growing up in Philadelphia—maybe I’d shared a wooder ice or heavily cheesed steak with him after school—and my

god, did it bring a nostalgic tear to my eye.

And so, when the national media noticed Gritty, all I could think was: get your hands off my city. To the New Yorker, Gritty was absurd, but to Philadelphians, he was just one of us. In a city where men post up on street corners to go fishing in the sewer; where it’s commonplace for bus drivers to stop traffic to have conversations with one another; where local hero Meek Mill was helicoptered into the Sixers’ locker room to hype up the team just hours after he was released from jail; and where the cancelation of an annual wing-eating contest recently incited public outcry (#RIPWingBowl), Gritty’s own chaos makes perfect sense.

But for Gritty, like the rest of us, with age came politicization. On September 26, two days after Gritty came onto the scene, Jacobin (the “leading voice of the American Left”) tweeted “Gritty is a worker.” Soon after, Donald Trump visited Philadelphia and Gritty appeared on a number of protesters’ picket signs. And with that, Gritty was swiftly concretized as a symbol of leftism nationwide. But as soon as memes emerged depicting Gritty calling for the fall of the state and chopping off Pepe the Frog’s head in a guillotine, so too did the conservative backlash. On October 7, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled “Antifa Appropriates a Creepy Mascot” with the subtitle “Keep your Marxist hands off Gritty. He belongs to Philly.”

While the Indy can get behind Gritty’s politics, this reporter—the Indy’s resident Philadelphian—must regrettably side with the Journal on one front: Gritty belongs to Philly. At the end of the day, his incorporation into socialist politics doesn’t really add up. He’s the mascot of a for-profit hockey team owned by Comcast, the second largest corporation in Philadelphia, and his team is living by the anti-union creed: last week, the real-life Flyers crossed a hotel workers picket line in Boston.

Gritty doesn’t work for socialism or the Wall Street Journal, but he works for Philly. He’s a perfect storm of Comcast, cheese-wiz orange fur, and havoc. As one caller to a local public radio program speculated, Gritty might have been birthed of the scrapyard fire that took place in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia around the same time he arrived on the scene. Gritty was born in Philly and, like any loyal Flyers fan, he’ll die there too.

-EC

PERSONAL EFFECTS

BY Liby Hays

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BEYOND THE CANDIDATES An independent midterms rundown Here we thread together national stories, revealed not through House or Senate races, but through ballot measures and referendums, speaking to the battles being fought nationwide over criminal justice reform, voting rights, and reproductive justice.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM There is not one criminal justice system in the United States, but many state and local level institutions and policies that, moving together over the past half-century, have built the largest carceral state in the world.

On Tuesday, activists and advocates continued the fight to dismantle mass incarceration in their states and communities.

In Florida, voters passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians convicted as felons and disenfranchised, even after they completed their sentences, by the state’s constitution. According to data from the Sentencing Project, in 2016 about 9.2 percent of the voting-age population could not vote, including 17.9 percent of African Americans.

Amendment 4 still excludes those convicted of murder or felony sex offenses. Only two other states, Kentucky and Iowa, still bar felons from voting after serving their sentences. On the flip side, only two states (Maine and Vermont) let people vote from prison.

In Colorado, Amendment A removed 142-year-old language from the state constitution allowing prison labor without pay. Colorado’s constitution previously contained a version of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US constitution banning chattel slavery “except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Jumoke Emery, a lead organizer with Abolish Slavery Colorado, reported on Monday that flyers for Amendment A were burned on his front porch. “It’s the equivalent of an 1820s cross burning in my front lawn,” he told the Denver Post. Amendment A echoes the demands of incarcerated workers in this year’s nationwide prison strike. Hourly wages for prison labor remain under $1 an hour in Colorado and many other states, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Across the nation at the local level, criminal legal reformers focused their energies on district attorneys, who have been singled out as key drivers of mass incarceration. Progressive DAs ran this election cycle on a platform of rejecting prosecutorial dogma—a culture of tough-on-crime sentencing—to deconstruct the machinery of the carceral state from the inside.

Wesley Bell became the first Black prosecutor of St. Louis County after unseating Robert McCulloh, known for failing to prosecute the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Bell promises to never seek the death penalty, eliminate cash bail, and oppose new mandatory minimums. Activist-journalist Shaun King’s Real Justice PAC endorsed Bell and a slew of other candidates. In Boston, Rachael Rollins became the first black woman DA of Suffolk County by pushing to not prosecute low-level nonviolent crimes. In Texas, Joe Gonzales (San Antonio) and John Creuzot (Dallas) also joined the small, but growing ranks of reformer prosecutors nationwide working to remake the institution they represent.

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NEWS

REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

VOTING RIGHTS

The struggle to derail reproductive justice will always play out on a state level. The right to abortion and reproductive health care access have been issues at the heart of political battles all year, and deeply influenced Tuesday’s midterms. Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation unearthed grave concerns over the future of Roe v. Wade, stoked by his anti-woman voting record and President Trump’s insistence on nominating a pro-life champion. To vote for Kavanaugh, in many voter’s minds, was to threaten the right to abortion.

It came as no surprise then, that reproductive justice was at the center of some of the hardest fought races in conservative America. Throughout the campaign season, Democrats like Missouri’s Senator McCaskill and North Dakota’s Senator Heitkamp were targeted repeatedly and aggressively by their opponents for their support of late-term abortion, even as they tried to remain mum on the subject entirely. At the end of the night, both women were defeated by staunch pro-life Republicans. Though most of the attention on reproductive rights this Tuesday was focused on specific candidates like McCaskill and Heitkamp, abortion also found its way onto state level ballots, producing immediate consequences that most overlooked entirely.

Since 2017, state legislatures all over the country have passed over 60 distinct anti-abortion measures, restricting access to funding, shutting down clinics, or imposing term limits on the procedure. State level policies have always been the tool with which Roe v. Wade opponents could still make headway, and the policies always hurt low-income women first and worst. This year, three states had explicit abortion measures on the ballots. Oregon, West Virginia and Alabama asked voters to choose sides on constitutional amendments and funding restrictions, initiatives that ranged from largely symbolic to immediately consequential.

Alabama saw the proposal of an amendment to the constitution that would end all abortion access.

Amendment 2 would “recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.” It was largely intended to act as a trigger law, waiting dormant until the moment the Supreme Court might decide to overturn Roe v.

Wade. If they did, the amendment could make abortion illegal in the state the moment it was overturned. With 59 percent, Alabama voted in favor of this amendment.

In West Virginia, if a person on Medicaid wanted an abortion procedure, Amendment 1 would force them to pay. The ballot initiative, titled the No Right to Abortion in Constitution Measure, proposed restrictions on taxpayer dollars to Medicaid-funded abortions.

The Amendment reads, “Nothing in this Constitution secures of protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of abortion.” West Virginians voted in favor of this amendment as well, passing it with 52 percent.

In Oregon, abortion rights saw one significant victory when voters struck down Measure 106, which would have walked back some of the most comprehensive pro-choice legislation in the country. In 2017, Governor Kate Brown signed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, making abortion, contraception, and all other reproductive health care free for Oregon residents. When this passed last year, Oregon became the 17th state to allow state money to go to abortion procedures. Measure 106 would have weakened this, restricting public funds for abortion. This was the first ballot initiative related to abortion brought to Oregonians for over the decade, the last one shot down in 2006. On Tuesday, 66 percent of voters said no to Measure 106.

Voter suppression was a crucial issue in this midterm, as in many of the elections that have preceded it.

Republican-driven measures have included voter ID laws in North Dakota that increasingly excluded Native Americans from exercising their right to vote. In Georgia, voter suppression at the hands of Republican gubernatorial candidate (and Secretary of State) Brian Kemp might have severely impacted the election—which remains contested—as polling stations in predominantly-Black Randolf County were closed in August, and 53,000 voter registrations were put on hold earlier this month.

This was part of a larger trend since the 2010 election. From that point, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 24 states have put stricter voter regulations in place, including cutting back on early voting, more restrictive voter ID laws, and making it harder for citizens to register, among others. The obstruction of voter rights is part of a much greater, shameful history of racialized disenfranchisement.

In the upside, the midterm results have also expanded voting rights in the states of Michigan, Maryland, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and Missouri through different measures. In Nevada, question 5 was passed with a 60 percent of the vote, allowing for Automatic Voter Registration at the DMV. In Michigan, Proposal 3 added eight voting policies to the Michigan Constitution, including straight-ticket voting, automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse absentee voting. While other policies included in the proposal were effectively in place, its approval added the security of a constitutional guarantee for the expansion of voting access in the state. In Maryland, measure 3, seeking to allow individuals to register at a polling place on election day, was approved by 67 percent. In the words of Political Science professor Juliet Hooker during a recent Midterm panel at Brown University, “this shows how intentions to impose minoritarian rule can be fought at the state level.”

Ahead of 2020, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, and Utah voted on independent redistricting measures, as a crucial move against gerrymandering. As of Wednesday night, Utah’s Proposition 4 to establish an independent redistricting commission remains unresolved with a slight lead of 50.37 percent of the vote, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. In Colorado, voters approved the creation of independent redistricting commissions for both congressional and state legislative districts. In less fortunate events, Arkansas and North Carolina approved ballot initiatives requiring photo IDs to vote.

Finally, in the name of karmic justice, conservative Kris Kobach lost the race for governor of Kansas to progressive Laura Kelly. Kobach has been at the forefront of Republican efforts to restrict voter rights, when he sought to require, in addition to photo-IDs, for people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote. Kelly defeated him last night with 47.8 pecent of the vote. And for that, we celebrate.

BY Mara Dolan, Lucas Smolcic Larson, and Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Christie Zhong

09 NOV 2018

THROUGH THE THE MUCK MUCK THROUGH Introducing an Indy series on climate change in RI

We have no idea how to think about climate. Over-dramatized headlines responding to last month’s United Nations IPCC report yell at us: “The World Was Just Issued 12-Year Ultimatum On Climate Change.” This Smithsonian article and so many like it warn of global catastrophe if we blow past 1.5 degrees of warming. However, this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to an economist whose model positions four degrees of warming as optimal—a direct contradiction of the IPCC report’s findings. While stickers on the wall tell us to turn out the lights, Providence’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America calls for more drastic measures like nationalizing our electric grid (more on this in Issue 8). And as some friends tell us it’s wrong to bring kids into a warming world, others wring their hands as they climb into Uber XLs. “The world is fucked anyway,” they say— or, worse, “Elon Musk will save us.” It’s clear that—decades after climate change was discovered and 25 years of UN climate conferences later—this is a problem like no other.

How could anyone possibly sort through all this? Many writers have realized we must think beyond the political and the scientific and move instead towards a cultural and philosophical conception of climate change. Our “wicked” problem, writes Amitav Ghosh in his book The Great Derangement, “may require us to abandon some of our most treasured ideas about political virtues: for example, ‘be the change you want to see.’” Furthermore, writes philosopher Dale Jamieson in his book Reason for a Dark Time, “it is clear that we will have to live with climate change and find meaning and joy in a world that increasingly fails to resemble the one in which we came to consciousness.”

Despite its global geography, the fight over climate change is often playing out on the local level. Here in Rhode Island, we build wind terminals on Block Island on Monday and fracked gas power plants in South Providence on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Office of Energy Resources publishes climate resilience plans which set (non-binding) emissions targets and yet on Thursday, the Department of Environmental Management still can’t get criminal polluters to stop. Rhode Island, like the rest of the world, is juggling conflicting narratives surrounding climate change.

And with underfunded local news media, it can feel like there’s no one to make sense of things for us.

The day the UN IPCC report was released, Twitter user @ raludwick put out a call to action: “What media everywhere should be doing this week: hyper local features about what it would look like in practice for their city or region to take 1.5º seriously.” But when we grabbed the ProJo off our front porch the morning after the IPCC report was released, we saw no mention of climate change. Only one reporter, Alex Kuffner, covers energy and the environment for the city’s only major newspaper, down from four or five reporters ten years ago. And on the editorial side of the ProJo, things are even more bleak: recent editorials have repeatedly defended the Burrillville power plant and called for new gas pipelines, saying that environmental “Zealots” and “purists” “put politics ahead of reality” and use “the magical powers of unicorns.”

Meanwhile, local reporter Steve Ahlquist’s crowdfunded Uprise RI blog attempts to fill in the gaps left by the ProJo, covering every topic related to social justice that he has time to write about. But it’s near-impossible for one person and a camera to cover an issue as sprawling as environmental justice in the state of Rhode Island. “The more complicated stories or the more depressing stories don't bring the readers,” Ahlquist told the College HIll Independent. “I think climate change feels impossible and depressing to people.”

So climate change demands writing that is hopeful and imaginative, local and technical, to help us wade through the muck and figure out what the hell is going on. This is our goal for a series of articles that will run in the next three issues in the Indy: a collaboration between the Metro and Science & Tech sections that begins to tackle the big questions. What will it take to quickly and justly make Rhode Island’s electricity grid and transportation network carbon free (Issues 8 and 9)? How can our state government respond to global crises like sea level rise and deadly temperatures (Issue 9)? And, lastly, how can our communities come together, in fighting power plants and rethinking our relationship to our environments, to push for a cleaner, safer world (Issue 10)? In all of these stories, we talk to local experts and activists in an attempt to demystify what it would mean to fight climate change in Rhode Island.

CLIMATE GOALS The UN IPCC special report released in October of 2018 warned that if global temperature rise exceeds 1.5º, the effects would be catastrophic. In order to limit warming to 1.5º, global CO2 emissions must be reduced to 45% below 2010 levels by 2030, and emissions must be net zero by 2050. Rhode Island’s CO2 emission targets don’t come close to meeting the IPCC guidelines, nor are they binding. The goals call for CO2 emissions to be:

10% below 1990 levels by 2020 45% below 1990 levels by 2035 80% below 1990 levels by 2050

“I really come at it from the social justice perspective more than an environmentalist one. I am an environmentalist- I I think of it in terms how the rights of the people, how the health of the people are considered, and obviously that’s a social justice issue.”

- Steve Ahlquist, Uprise RI

“I could write about these issues every day. As far as educating people, getting people to understand, it’s not about writing about the reports...it’s about finding out what the effects are right now, and getting very, very specific. For me at least, that’s my job. If I can take a report and then use that to find the very specific things that are happening here, that’s what I want to do.”

- Alex Kuffner, Energy and Environment reporter, Providence Journal

“Not everyone in RI is spending time on the ocean. It’s important to focus on the urban center in RI as well, the Providence metro area and making sure that people who are not necessarily going to the beach but are nonetheless affected but climate change in various ways are getting news that are relevant to them.”

-Sunshine Menezes, Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode

HARRY AUGUST B’19, ELLA COMBERG B’20, JULIA ROCK B’19 refuse to believe that climate change is an impossible issue to write about.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

CLIMATE

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WE CAN'T LIVE ON BOOKS ALONE The Fight for Graduate Worker Power Brown University’s Graduate School recently bought two Facebook ads targeting their students’ unionization efforts, one titled “Do You Need a Union,” the other “Know the Facts.” The latter stated that, were graduate students to unionize, union dues would amount to $650 a year. The text was accompanied by a bright red dollar sign. These ads are the public face of Brown’s anti-unionization efforts. Meanwhile, students like Kaitlyn Quaranta, a third year doctoral student in Brown’s Department of French Studies who proudly displays an “I’m Voting Union YES!” pin over her heart, are the face of Brown graduate students’ efforts to unionize.

The push by graduate students to unionize at Brown has largely been taken up by Stand Up for Graduate Student Employees (SUGSE). Quaranta, who is a member of SUGSE, told the College Hill Independent that she joined because, while Brown “has been saying time and time again that grad students are just students” she and SUGSE “want to be recognized for the work that we do for the university. We are doing the teaching and research that allows the university to run.” Indeed, as Quaranta conducts her own research, she simultaneously teaches Introductory French, requiring her to plan classes, teach lessons, and meet with students during and outside of office hours. “You’re that main person who a student goes to,” she told the Indy, “It is a lot of work and it sometimes can cut into the time that I need for other things—my research, for example.”

According to the website College Factual, instructional graduate assistants are responsible for approximately 31 percent of the teaching done at Brown. In doing this kind of professional work, they have taken on the responsibility of creating syllabi, developing book lists, grading papers, meeting with students, giving lectures, and advising, which for many grad students is required as part of their programs. They do all of this while conducting their own research and composing dissertations, projects that can require years of intensive work. They are students of the university who have come here to gain experience, yet, as Quaranta illustrates, they are performing the duties of employees.

And, as workers, the graduate students know they deserve to be compensated for all that they do.

SUGSE hopes that, if graduate students at Brown unionize, they will be able to collectively bargain and define their rights as employees of the university.

SUGSE is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), as are similar unions at other universities such as Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and more. By affiliating themselves with the AFT, the second largest higher teacher’s union in the country, SUGSE is gaining the backing they need to stand up for their rights. +++

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METRO

The national graduate fight for unionization has been started in 1972, when Stanford PhD research assistants sought collective representation. Although they were unsuccessful, in 2000 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that graduate students at New York University could unionize. This decision was challenged by Brown University in 2004, and was overturned by a then-majority Republican NLRB. More recently, graduate student advocacy for unionization has taken hold at many private American universities, especially since 2014, when the NLRB granted review of Columbia University graduate students’ petition to unionize. In 2016, the so-called “Columbia Decision” took effect. Under the Obama administration, the decision that narrowly defined graduate students only as students was reversed. Under this new ruling, graduate students can be considered employees of the university, and, like any employee who feels the need for representation within a company, can now unionize.

On June 21, 2018, Brown University signed an agreement with SUGSE for a fair and free election that would allow graduate students to vote for unionization. +++ Unionization has the potential to greatly improve the lives and well-being of graduate students at Brown.

While the University affords them some benefits like health and dental care, graduate students often feel that administrators make decisions behind closed doors without consulting the graduate students who will be affected. As Quaranta told the Indy, “We’re fighting for things like a say in our health insurance, additional support for grad parents, support for international students, a fair grievance procedure, transparency in payscale, and work expectations.”

Specifically, they seek childcare for the children of grad students as well as an affordable healthcare plan that covers dependents, wage increases, and additional support for international students. The only way that these demands will be addressed, however, is through a contract that follows unionization.

One important issue outlined by SUGSE is that of fair grievance procedures. As of now, without a union, graduate students facing an issue regarding sexual violence, interpersonal harm, or discrimination by a faculty member or administrator must stand up to the University independently. A union, in contrast, would allow graduate students facing one of the above issues to collectively bargain. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations defines collective bargaining as “the process in which working people, through their unions, negotiate contracts with their employers to determine their terms of employment, including pay, benefits, hours, leave, job health and safety policies, ways to balance

work and family, and more.” The power to collectively bargain would provide grad students with necessary backing as they move forward with complaints. This is especially valuable in incidents of sexual harassment or assault. Because Brown’s Title IX office is still part of the University administration, “It still falls under this particular power structure and it’s not independent of it. It’s difficult for it to really execute the justice that the law promises,” Kay Thompson, a SUGSE organizer and third-year PhD student in the Anthropology department, told the Independent. Unionization would give victims of sexual misconduct more of a platform to stand up against perpetrators outside of the power structure defined by the University. +++ According to Thompson, over the past few months, SUGSE has gotten a sense of graduate students’ grievances through “very informal conversations where we go visit folks in their offices and chat with them about what their working conditions are like, find out what’s important to their experience at Brown, find out what are things that would make it better.” Then, they began “moving folks to action.” Thompson points to a “rally to encourage the university to finalize the pre-election agreement” and “sticker and button days to spread awareness” as successes. And, to galvanize excitement about SUGSE, the group screened the film Sorry To Bother You, because, according to Thompson, it shows “what collective action can look like in a workplace.”

Despite these efforts, not all graduate student employees are supportive of the efforts to unionize.

In a November 7 Herald op-ed, a group of graduate students allege that members of SUGSE have been overly hostile to the University administration, which they claim to be a “trustworthy support system” that has provided sufficient benefits for graduate student employees. They also characterize SUGSE as having “ignored the rights of underrepresented groups.” But in conversation with the Indy, Thompson was adamant that SUGSE is “an anti-racist, feminist group has a lot to contribute to issues that are of concern to minoritized grads.” +++ Many administrators have also pushed back against unionization, consistently invoking the notion of the “mentor-mentee relationship.” As Provost Richard Locke wrote in a Letter to The Editor in the Herald, “While we recognize and value the work our graduate students do as teaching and research assistants, our principal relationship with our graduate students is as students. This guides how we admit, recruit and train these students.” This characterizes the role of graduate

09 NOV 2018

BY Dylan Lewis ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Christie Zhong

students as here to learn and train to be professors, in turn diminishing the teaching they do as only a part of the process that helps them reach the status of PhD rather than a form of real employment. William Keach, professor of English at Brown, on the other hand positions them as educators. “I would say they’re functioning as teachers at Brown and I think on the whole they do a very good job,” he told the Indy. He went on to say that “the supervision they get when they’re in that type of role from the faculty in no way compromises the reality that they are performing important teaching work for the university and deserve to be regarded as employees, insofar as that’s what they’re doing, along with writing dissertations in which they’re in the role of a student.” Furthermore, to position graduate students as mentees or students before employees is outdated, because it relies on the overturned NLRB ruling stating that graduate students are only students. Now that graduate students can legally be considered employees per the Columbia Decision, to ignore their role as such disregards their rights as employees.

As efforts to unionize increase at Brown, the University has matched them with resistance. Brown administrators insist that they are following whatever the federal ruling states, which shifts the role of graduate students depending on which political parties are in power. Under President Bush, the NLRB decided that graduate students only existed as students, however, under President Obama, this was overturned.

The definition of graduate students is emphatically partisan; Trump proudly diminishes worker’s rights and is aggressively anti-union. When Brown insists

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that it is just complying with the rules, it cowers behind Trump-era policies and prioritize their own corporate interests over those of the workers who keep the institution running. Brown recently hired a law firm, Bond, Schoeneck, & King, known for defending anti-union businesses. The firm is currently also representing the city of Watertown, NY as the city tries to deny firefighters pay for the out-of-title shifts that they worked as captains. The hiring of this anti-union law firm is a clear signal from the University that it is gearing up for a fight against unionization in the case that graduate students do vote “Yes.” In a Herald op-ed article published on October 15, Provost Richard Locke claims that SUGSE has not honored the pre-election agreement, according to anonymous grievances made against the group. He writes, “The graduate students who wrote complained of union organizers making blatantly false claims and employing tactics of harassment and intimidation.” grievances made against SUGSE should be reported to the American Arbitration Association, who is overseeing the election. As the organization’s website reads, “The AAA provides all stakeholders—union officials, employers, human resources executives, attorneys— with an orderly, efficient, flexible, and constructive path to dispute resolution.” Brown’s decision to respond to grievances against SUGSE without involving the AAA disregards the necessary role of an arbitrator to level the playing field between a powerful institution (like Brown) and a dissenting party (like SUGSE). Instead, handling these issues within the University allows Brown to retain an unequal degree of power.

What’s more, Brown promises a “fair and free” election, but it continues to push back the date of the election—a move that, according to Quaranta, is meant to confuse graduate students. Whereas the pre-election agreement between SUGSE and Brown stated that grad students must notify Brown 10 days before their intent to file a petition and once that petition is filed the election must take place no more than 15 days after, an email from Brown sent on October 12 stated that the petition would be filed October 21, and the election is beginning November 14. +++ Worker solidarity is terrifying for institutions. “Brown really has an opportunity to live up to their stated vision or their reputation as being an inclusive university community,” says Thompson. “The great thing about having this election is that it’s a chance for all of us to hear grads’ voices and we’re going to make our voices heard loud and clear.” As graduate students prepare to vote on unionization of November 14 and 15, they have the potential to redefine their place within Brown. Says Thompson, “we’ve been working and organizing this for two years. And we’re ready.”

DYLAN LEWIS B’22 believes voting can change power.

METRO

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THE CHILDREN WHO LEAVE AND THE BURDEN THEY CARRY content warning: state violence, racism

“They leave because they want to break the curse that steals since 2014. The youth in my country have not stopped their dreams the moment they are born.” migrating, despite the long and dangerous journey. Due to the extreme poverty, the increasing violence, the This line begins and concludes a recent article in lack of basic needs that our government should provide Skylight written by Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, to all citizens like education, health and housing, Maya-K’iche’ journalist, activist, and Brown University migrating is the only option left for entire generations. visiting professor from Guatemala. Professor Nimatuj For a lot of young people, staying in Guatemala means asks, and answers, why do children leave my country? incorporating themselves into organized crime and Armed conflict, loss of loved ones, destruction of gangs as the only means of survival. Guatemala is a resources, natural disasters, and poverty are some of failed state...Guatemala is a country with high levels of the reasons that push children to leave Guatemala in corruption and those in power only support the interest search of a better life. These children, she explains, of a small economic and political elite. seek to break the cycle of poverty into which they were born. Following this piece, she wrote an open letter to The Indy: What do you think about the so-called President Donald Trump and the government of the “migrant caravan” and its media coverage in the US? United States, explaining the factors that push people out of their homes and their countries.

VN: For me, it is not a caravan; it is a humanitarian Dr. Nimatuj is an international spokeswoman crisis. Now, this is a humanitarian crisis from many for Indigenous communities in Central America and communities. Many Indigenous, many poor people, was the first Maya-K’iche’ woman to earn a doctorate live in poverty, with no dreams, no possibilities, no in social anthropology. Ki’che’ translates to “many options. It’s unacceptable. Because those countries are trees,” named for the highland mountain valley where very rich countries, and they are beautiful countries. the K’iche’ people have resided for over one thousand The media in the US—they don’t care about years, predating the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in Indigenous people. The majority of people here don’t 1534 and subsequent colonization. Dr. Nimatuj played know where Central America is. Now they have a lot of a central role in making racial discrimination illegal in bias about people from Central America, a lot of stereoGuatemala and is featured in 500 Years, a documentary types. They don’t know the history, the responsibility about Indigenous resistance movements, for her role of the US, they don’t know what type of government as an activist and expert witness in war crimes trials. is there. The coverage in the news is very poor. The Dr. Nimatuj writes a weekly newspaper column for poverty is caused by the state, and the government is El Periódico de Guatemala and has served on the UN incredibly ignorant of reality.

Commission on the Status of Women, representing In Central America, the countires of Guatemala, Latin America and the Caribbean. This fall, she joined Honduras, and El Salvador are controlled by very the Watson Institute at Brown, where she teaches few—a political and economic elite. In the case of courses about Central American history and culture Guatemala, for example, eight families control the and continues her activism remotely. whole country. Twenty families control El Salvador. It Conservative discourse in mainstream media is the same in Honduras. It is impossible. They control portrays immigrants as criminals deceiving US citizens the land. They control the businesses. They control into believing that those who seek asylum are “illegal” the education. They control the schools. They control and somehow pose a threat. Dr. Nimatuj seeks to the church. They control the state. They control everycenter these conversations and debates around asylum thing. This is the problem. seekers and affirm their humanity. While political rhetoric focuses on the consequences of immigration The Indy: How would you respond to the current to the US, there is an underlying and often unspoken anti-immigrant discourse in the US? question: What are the conditions that people are so desperate to escape? The answers to this question VN: If the United States wants to stop migration, the are deeply connected to US foreign policy in Central country needs to reevaluate its foreign policy. The US America over the past decades. needs to reevaluate the way its money is spent so that The Independent met with Dr. Nimatuj to discuss current and future donations and aid are not lost to migration patterns to the United States from Central corruption. That is why programs centered on reducing America, Indigenous resistance in Guatemala, and our poverty cannot be imposed using a foreign or elite collective responsibility to young people who are forced vision; they need to be created alongside communities. to decide between violence at home and a dangerous The way our country is run cannot be conditioned by journey North. Dr. Nimatuj provides an inspiring, crit- the policies or decisions of the United States. ical perspective on the people behind the incisive rhetoric in American media today.

The Indy: How could this story be told better? +++ The College Hill Independent: You recently wrote an article about unaccompanied children leaving Guatemala and the trauma of state violence. What motivated you to write this piece?

Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj: It was the profound indignation and pain I felt seeing kids and young people attempting to cross the border unaccompanied

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NEWS

VN: To read about the history of US interventions in these countries. This is the best way people can learn about what happened, why people left their communities, their houses, their countries, their families, their sons. You know? This is crazy. For me, this is a humanitarian crisis, and nobody wants to talk about it. The caravan is being used [politically] lightly—only as a fear, a terror. They are bad people, they are delinquent, they have a lot of illnesses. You know? This is not true.

The Indy: What steps can we collectively take to improve conditions in Guatemala?

VN: We need the Indigenous population to be able to create their own self-sustaining development and not turn them into dependents of political favors or short term social program offers. To achieve this, the government and transnational companies need to stop encroaching on the last of the Indigenous territory to favor mining companies that only leave one percent of royalties in Guatemala. That is why there is so much poverty in Guatemala, because companies are arriving and pilfering the territory and natural resources, leaving behind social conflict. It is ridiculous that a country as rich as Guatemala needs to survive on donations from the international community and that despite this aid, poverty increased eight percent in the last decade. This goes to show that the majority of the aid is not well implemented and only used to increase the riches of a few politicians.

The Indy: Do you have any comments on Trump’s recent threat to cut aid to Honduras?

VN: Foreign aid is beneficial but not the way it is being used right now. Aid for the militarization of our countries or to fight the war of drugs has not yielded any positive effects for Central America. Instead it has led to more violence and corruption of the militaries, elites and politicians. In Guatemala, military vehicles donated by the United States are used to intimidate the population in the entire country and even to surround and threaten the U.S. embassy in the capital. We don’t need any more of that aid. If Trump cuts foreign aid, I highly doubt that the poorest and most needed communities and people would notice a difference.

Central America is currently surviving thanks to the remittances sent from immigrants living abroad. They are the ones who are really providing aid. +++ The Indy: How did you initially become involved in activism, and how does it connect to your work as a scholar and journalist?

VN: I was born in a K’iche community that has always been politically active. My community has resisted since 1524 when the Spanish arrived at our territory.

During the following three centuries of the colonial era and through independence of Guatemala in 1821, my community managed to maintain a few political spaces and some power. Yet it was not until 1972 that the Indigenous population of my city founded a civic community, called Xel-Ju, and from there fought to win the mayoral elections of my city, finally winning in 1996. This means that I am a product of a long line of my community’s struggle since the Spanish invasion. Being an activist cannot be separated from my academic work because it is my responsibility to use academia to help and contribute to my community and my people. My achievements represent a responsibility to the other generations and to the ongoing processes of Indigenous resistance in Guatemala and Latin America.

09 NOV 2018

BY Jessica Murphy ILLUSTRATION Miranda Villanueva DESIGN Amos Jackson

Professor, activist, and journalist Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj on her commitment to justice and fighting for Indigenous communities in Guatemala

The Indy: What does it mean to you to be a Maya The Indy: What are the different Indigenous groups in The Indy: What type of work will you do after this year?

K’iche’ woman and to hold the position that you hold? Guatemala, and are there connections between them?

VN: I’m working with Indigenous communiVN: In some ways, it’s incredible, you know? But in VN: Guatemala has 24 different Indigenous people, ties, Indigenous organizations in different parts of other ways it is sad for my people. If I think of only me, Maya has 22 inside, plus Xinca and Garífuna. We work Guatemala and Central and South America. I have and my family, probably I can feel that this is incred- together since many generations ago. Very long rela- a very strong relationship with many Indigenous ible. But I am part of a community, so for me it is very tionship. Why? Because we come from decolonization, leaders around Latin America. We are working for our hard to have this position and to be here with every- decolonization is the same for us. We speak different rights—social, economic, and political. The population thing and to think that the majority of my brothers and languages, have different cultures, clothes. But in front of Guatemala is 17 million people. We are around 10 sisters, especially Indigenous women, live on one or of the state, we come from the same decolonization. million Indigenous people but we don’t have political two dollars a day. This is hard. I try to enjoy this part of I continue the job that my parents and grandparents power. It is like South Africa. So we don’t have political my life but also every day my history reminds me that did. Together we share an organization, we share insti- power; we are working for political power.

I have a lot of responsibility also. I try to teach in the tutions, we travel a lot, we have meetings in different best way that I can to my students the reality of Central communities. I am a K’iche’, I live next to Mexico, but +++ America, the reality of Indigenous communities, and sometimes I travel to other parts of my country to work that we have a lot of privileges, I have a lot of privi- with the Garifuna people.

VN: I would like to add something to the students: leges. So our responsibility is to use all these privileges I went to university in the middle of the Civil War in for justice, for peace, for a better world. To take care of my country. I survived—I don’t know how I survived. the natural—another type of relation in political, social, Because a lot of Indigenous students, a lot of my profesand economic ways. sors were killed, were disappeared. And many of them I try to use my space, my voice, every time, everyare still disappeared. Many of them left the country, where, for my people. I try to use this, especially for they field to different places—US, Canada, Mexico, the most poor, for the people who don’t have these Europe. For me, to go to university in the middle of the opportunities. Academia needs to be not only in the Civil War, also was the opportunity to understand my academy, in academic spaces. We need to break this, country, to understand what is the history of us. But and to support and involve other struggles. Not only in also to understand that if we survive, we have responCentral America, in Africa, but also here, in the United sibilities. I survived, and I would like to say to students States, a lot of people are living in very bad conditions. that they have a lot of opportunities here. They have everything. You don’t need anything from other spaces.

The Indy: How do you advocate for native rights in You have libraries, you have the best professors, you Guatemala, and what does your activism entail? have the best courses, the best campus. So use it; use it to change the world. Use all this knowledge for building VN: I became a journalist which allowed me to see other possibilities, other ways, another world. Not only firsthand the social, political, economic and racial for you but for the rest of the world. If you want peace, problems of my country. However, I felt that, given the if you want security, you need to demand the same for power of the media in my country and its conservative the rest of the youth. nature, it was almost impossible to problematize the everyday reality of Indigenous people. That is why I felt JESSICA MURPHY B’19 wants you to learn more that I needed to complement my training, and I found about indigenous women’s resistance in Guatemala at the way to do so in activist anthropology. I learned that 12pm, Monday 11/12 at the Watson Institute: https:// academia has a responsibility to the communities and watson.brown.edu/events/2018/irma-velasquez-nipeople with which we chose to do our research work. As matuj-justice-beyond-final-verdict-role-court-ora social activist anthropologist, I use the academic and dered-reparations. theoretical tools I learn to carry out research that can be The Indy: Have you connected with any Indigenous useful to Indigenous communities in my country. communities here in the Northeast?

Recently I have contributed to several expert witness reports related to processes of transitional VN: I have some friends, some relationships. But it’s justice for the human rights violations committed hard because for the rest of my sisters and brothers, during Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict. Even the language barrier is difficult. We exchange our expethough Indigenous people make up the majority of the riences. We visit universities. I had the opportunity to population of the country, the political power we hold visit in Canada and US. But the situation is so different is minimal. I also try to use my voice in public spaces in terms of the land. They live in separate spaces and to denounce the inequalities in which the majority of we have our lands. It is very different. We have our my people live. Given the racism, poverty and oppres- Indigenous languages, while they almost lost everysion towards Indigenous women in my country, which thing. The relationship is great, important to exchange, is controlled by a small elite, I see it as my responsi- but the reality is different. But colonization is the same. bility to document, analyze and also denounce these The quality of Indigenous education is very bad. multiple oppressions.

The Indians in Guatemala don’t have value for the state.

In Guatemala, eight families control 45 percent of Bilingual education has a low budget, the majority the wealth of the country. This did not happen out of from international support—from the US and Europe, luck, this is a result of nation-states being at the service for example. We need more bilingual education in of elites who historically benefited from the hunger and middle school, high school, and even university. The poverty of the majority. The current ‘migrant crisis’ is a majority of books are in Spanish. It’s crazy—we have 24 result of past failures from Central American govern- Indigenous languages but only one official language, it ments but also failed foreign policies of the United is Spanish. This is part of decolonization.

States. If we don’t change both, our children and future generations will have to pay for our mistakes.

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NEWS

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DATA DEMOCRACY

BY Angie Kim ILLUSTRATION Grace Zhang DESIGN Christie Zhong At a typical phone banking meeting, volunteers cluster around a table or two. They all go to the website that hosts their campaign software and enter the system using their unique volunteer logins. The leader of the meeting then provides an ID for volunteers to feed into the system, which allows them to access the list of people to be contacted. The list is automatically constructed within the database to pull together voters whose data places them in specific groups that the campaign wants to target, such as undecided young voters. Each volunteer’s first voter file pops up, which reveals someone’s phone number and relevant information about them such as their age and other members of their household. Shown next to their information, an accompanying script tailored to the list remains consistent throughout the session.

And so the calls begin. Scattered throughout the script are dropdown menus from which volunteers select options based on responses from the call. Each conversation—if everything goes well—usually ends with the classic ask: “Can we count on your support this election?”

With the widespread implementation of datadriven political campaign strategies, data collected from these canvassing efforts has become increasingly crucial. Yet with the advent of advanced technological tools and more ways to collect personal data, the broader implications of using these to influence the public should be questioned. +++ Public relations campaigns play a massive role in shaping our patterns of consumption, and with the rise of Big Data—which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “Extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions”—these techniques have grown exponentially in sophistication. No longer do advertisers have to appeal to the average consumer in order to sell; they’re now able to understand and target niches with an unprecedented level of granularity. Political campaigns have similarly evolved: Our hearts and minds have been treated as a marketplace, with campaigns competing to sell us platforms in exchange for our votes. Though this strategy has met varying success, it has become widely implemented by the Democratic and Republican establishments alike since it was piloted in Obama’s 2012 campaign.

The use of Big Data has caused a massive shift in the way campaigns are run. In the past, campaigns vied for political support through traditional media outlets, such as television and radio. Though political messaging was widespread, its reach was inherently limited by its medium, since messages could only be shared to an indiscriminate audience. In the same way businesses had to advertise their products to the average buyer, candidates’ best strategy was to appeal to the average, undecided voter in an attempt to swing their support.

This is no longer the case. Since the advent of datadriven campaigns, appeals to the masses have largely been replaced. Instead, the predominant strategy for candidates has become identifying their base and mobilizing them to vote. In the US, both parties make use of tools that allow them to do this. Democratic campaigns use NGP VAN, a software that provides “websites…organizing, fundraising, compliance, and digital tools” for progressive campaigns; Republicans have begun to use the services of a rival company, NationBuilder. These software-as-service companies are the leaders in campaign data management and 09

SCIENCE & TECH

Big Data and the pitfalls of targeted campaigning are used by campaigns across the United States and around the world.

The databases hosted on these services are, in their most basic form, contact lists of individuals to reach out to about the candidate’s platform. But in addition to knowing your address and party affiliation, campaigns are able to build a detailed profile that includes your interests and past interactions with not just the candidate themselves, but with the party with which they’re affiliated. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that political campaigns in the US also have access to “income, number of homes, kinds of vacations, number of children and education history” and can purchase consumer data.

Using this information, voter database software creates predictive scores determining behavior, support, and responsiveness. Behavior scores indicate the likelihood of a voter taking certain actions, such as donating, volunteering, and going to the polls.

Support scores reflect how much the individual would support the candidate. Responsiveness scores represent whether someone will react to outreach favorably, negatively, or whether they’ll respond at all. A combination of the three creates segmentations in the voter database for issue-specific email blasts to be sent to, or lists of people for volunteers to call.

Furthermore, with rapid technological advancement, the sophistication of machine learning models has accelerated over the past few years alone. As exemplified by the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, this has allowed political campaigns and consultancies to go even further. Rather than using only the information found through public voting records and data collected by people, campaigns can take advantage of advanced psychological models created using machine learning techniques that have only recently become possible through increased computing power.

Cambridge Analytica uses individuals’ data to score them on their “openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.” Profiles generated from these models broaden the ways in which campaigns can reach the electorate; for example, online advertisements can be targeted to individuals whose browsing history classifies them as likely supporters. +++

for Illinois’ 7th congressional district expressed this frustration: “What’s one more way you can stack the deck against me? Deny me access to valuable information and data.” Clark ran as a Justice Democrat, part of a coalition inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid that hopes to push the Democratic party to the left. Many of these candidates were denied access to the party’s troves of data. Sanders himself was embroiled in a data-centered scandal in December 2015 when his campaign mistakenly received access to Hillary Clinton’s voter database; in response, the DNC shut his campaign out of NGP VAN entirely.

These candidates often choose to run under the Democratic label in the first place because they foresee difficulties in running without a mainstream party name attached to them. Yet when state party leadership—which largely supports the establishment— wields the power to choose who does and does not get data, it discourages those who don’t fit into the mold from throwing their hats into the ring at all.

There already exist massive financial barriers for candidates who are challenging party establishment; the added challenge that comes from lacking data, however, is that it’s nearly impossible to get even close to the same level of sophistication by starting from zero.

As data becomes currency for political power, incumbents are the richest, leaving challengers knocking on doors with no sense of who might be on the other side.

More insidiously, however, massive amounts of data on the electorate have enabled a phenomenon that parallels market segmentation. The splitting of messaging to cater to highly specific groups further commodifies public opinion as something to be bought and sold, rather than something that is formed organically. Today, mainstream campaigns with rich voter data opt to communicate with individuals whom they’ve algorithmically determined to support them, rather than appealing to broader groups. Campaigns are now putting greater attention on converting existing support into votes than on expanding their base, under the assumption that costs are better spent on the former.

Whether this has contributed to or is a result of political polarization is unclear, but this practice effectively limits public discourse by reinforcing already-entrenched beliefs among voters, rather than creating productive conversation on important issues.

Compounded with the rising ideological insularity of social circles and online spaces oft-criticized by political figures, data-driven outreach practices and advertisements have become an ironic blow to democratic principles. In an interview with Vox, Yale political science professor Eitan Hersh agreed that campaigns are “not looking to persuade people with ideas or arguments; they're just identifying the people most likely to vote for them and excluding everyone else.”

This is not to say that it’s inherently bad for candidates to know more about their constituents. The wealth of data owned by campaigns can reveal meaningful insights about voters’ priorities that genuinely lead to better representation of the electorate once a candidate is in office. And given the reality that data is driving the future of decision making—though this should certainly be interrogated, too—it would be foolish to suggest that campaigns stop using the data readily accessible to them. Yet we will never enact broader societal change if campaigns continue to target only those who are committed to them. After all, what would happen if nobody could change their mind?

The spread of campaign strategies that rely on such an intimate “understanding” of voters can actually harm democracy in two important ways.

First, the proliferation of data-driven campaign strategies creates additional resource disparities between candidates that can discourage potential contenders from running. Most notably, the Democratic National Committee has formally partnered with NGP VAN, which means that the party decides who can and cannot receive access to the company’s different platforms. The VoteBuilder system—which Wired Magazine called “the central nervous system of every Democratic campaign”—hosts the unified database to which all state parties have access and which holds all of the voter data the party has accumulated over nearly 10 years. However, in states such as Illinois and Missouri, state party policy dictates that candidates running against incumbents do not get to share the wealth of data that lives in that ecosystem. These candidates can get access to other NGP VAN tools to host data they collect over the course of their campaign, but are at a clear disadvantage without the more sophisticated ANGIE KIM B’20 is from Canada. datasets of their rivals.

Such a policy clearly privileges those already in power. Anthony Clark, a Democratic primary candidate

09 NOV 2018

BY Cashen Conroy ILLUSTRATION Stephanie Wu DESIGN Bethany Hung

THE COUNCIL Rachel Miller reimagines Providence politics

On the night of the 2018 Rhode Island primaries, Rachel Miller, a candidate for Providence’s Ward 13 City Council seat, had more than polling numbers on her mind. Earlier that day, a friend who was volunteering for her campaign got a frantic call about an immigration enforcement raid occurring just a few blocks away. He was still making phone calls himself, attempting to provide emergency support for the families that had been picked up, when Miller joined him on the back steps of her apartment hours later. She was there by his side, listening to his conversations about the recent deportations, when she got a text telling her to come back to the office—she had won.

That moment highlighted some of the main concerns of Ward 13 that Miller hopes to address as a City Council member. “It was like, of course [this happened]—that’s how our lives are, that’s how this neighborhood is,” Miller said in an interview with the Independent.

Ward 13, home to Federal Hill and much of the West End, is one of the most diverse areas of Providence.

According to the local nonprofit Providence Plan, nearly 50 percent of public school children in the Federal Hill area speak a language other than English as their first language, and that number rises to 68 percent in the West End for children under the age of six. 55.1 percent of West End residents are Hispanic, 19.0 percent are black, and 10.1 percent are Asian, according to Statistical Atlas. Both neighborhoods have median family incomes significantly below the citywide average.

Miller, like 68 percent of Federal Hill’s residents but only 12 percent of the West End’s population, is white. However, both of her parents were children of immigrants—her father’s father fled Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and her mother’s parents emigrated from Ireland to seek better opportunities. As someone who has been a community organizer for decades, she has extensive experience working to achieve both racial justice and immigration reform in Providence.

Back in September, Miller spoke about her stance on Providence’s immigration policies at a forum organized by the West Broadway Neighborhood Association. “I know that our city can do better, and that we do better, when we protect everyone in it,” she said. “We can enact a law that ensures that a traffic stop never turns into a deportation order, that when someone goes in for their marriage hearing… that does not turn into incarceration… we have not passed this ordinance in our city, and I would be happy to champion it.”

Now, she has a chance to. When she returned to the office her team had rented on the night of the primary, Miller learned that she had beat her main opponent, Cyd McKenna, by more than 10 percent of votes. With no competition on the Republican side, Miller was officially set to represent Federal Hill and sections of the West End for the next four years.

McKenna, the endorsed Democrat and the first to announce her candidacy, had been the predicted frontrunner in the race. A campaign manager for Buddy Cianci’s 2014 mayoral race and a former Chief of Staff for the City Council, she was a symbol, in many ways, of the city’s political past—one marked by political corruption and the relative conservatism of many Rhode Island Democrats. Miller, on the other hand, boasted an official endorsement by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that defines itself by a mission to “fight for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

power of working people.” In contrast to McKenna’s extensive political management experience, Miller offered a background in progressive community organizing. What brought her to Providence in the first place, back in 2003, was an opportunity to serve as the Executive Director of Rhode Island’s chapter of a national workers’ rights organization. Since then, she has also worked with Direct Action for Rights and Equality and various unions representing childcare providers and janitors. She also helped start the Rhode Island Working Families Party, an organization that has helped elect progressive Democrats across the state.

Miller’s win in September doesn’t only indicate what may be Providence’s increasingly progressive future—it’s also part of a monumental demographic shift in Providence’s politics. Once sworn in, Miller will join a Council that, for the first time in Providence’s history, is majority women.

“It’s for sure exciting,” Miller said, “because for years and years and years, there was the work of city government and then there were women’s issues, as a separate piece of the pie. I think one of the things that having a majority female Council does is make it so clear that we’re not talking about that [two seperate issues] anymore—that women’s issues are about schools and transportation and housing and healthcare.”

Though Miller is glad that the incoming Council will include more women’s voices, her hope is that the incorporation of new perspectives will extend beyond gender. Miller has been working to make underrepresented voices heard ever since her time as an undergraduate at the Catholic College of the Holy Cross, where she was one of 12 students campaigning for the official recognition of the school’s first LGBTQ organization. When she is sworn into office this winter, Miller hopes to continue bringing diverse perspectives to the forefront of decision-making. One of the questions she has been thinking about lately is, “How many different parts of my neighborhood can come into City Council Chambers with me?” The goal, she says, is as many as possible. +++

which she says have the power to positively impact neighborhood homeowners while also “targeting problem absentee landlords.”

“There is not a shortage of policy ideas… But we need to take this moment to build consensus both on the Council and in our neighborhoods on policy ideas that create maximum impact,” she said.

Meanwhile, Providence’s current City Council is still debating whether to support the Hope Point Tower project, a 46-story luxury apartment building on Dyer Street. Unlike many developers of other downtown projects, the Hope Point Tower developer has pledged to hire locally, which is why Miller doesn’t necessary oppose the project—she lists economic development and local jobs as two other priority issues along with affordable housing. However, for Miller, it’s vital that opportunities for economic development don’t sacrifice affordability, cause displacement, or infringe on workers’ rights in the process.

“When the city is going to use money for private development to give a tax break to someone putting up a hotel or a building, [we need to] think about how that impacts our community—the West End, the South Side, the neighborhoods that are predominantly communities of color,” she told the Independent. That’s why, Miller says, if she were currently on the Council, she would create more inclusionary zoning policies, such as ones that would require a certain number of units of any new development to be affordable onsite, or require that contributions be made to a housing trust for the purpose of developing affordable housing.

Miller’s experience as the executive director of Rhode Island’s Jobs with Justice, fighting for fair economic development and workers’ rights, has helped shape these policy ideas—and that’s just one example of a mission she used to organize around that she now hopes to bring with her to City Hall. She has also spent time organizing for racial justice and wants to focus on that during her time in office as well.

“I want to make sure racial profiling by the police is confronted at every step,” she told the Independent.

“These are all things that have been important for communities in Providence for many, many decades, well before anyone ever thought that Donald Trump would be president. But I think [the current national political state] creates a heightened urgency to really double down on that stuff.”

Miller acknowledges that some of her goals may be difficult to achieve; she knows that not everyone shares her democratic socialist views. However, she says she’s committed to upholding the values upon which she ran her campaign, even in the face of challenges.

“Look, I think there are reasons that we don’t have all of these things,” she told the Independent. “I know there are others on the Council who also care about these issues, but there are people within the Council and in the city who are pretty strongly opposed to some of this stuff. And that’s always going to be the case. When we’re talking about leveling the playing field for working people, for poor people, for communities of color, for families, we’re going up against… the wealthy and the well-connected [who] have enjoyed a certain amount of access in government—not just in Providence but in government, period—for a long time,” she added. “So it’s an uphill battle for sure.”

Miller may have some help with this uphill battle.

Other progressives joining her on City Council include 21-year-old Katherine Kerwin, a vocal gun control advocate who called her 21-year incumbent opponent’s lack of action “embarrassing.” Overall, the outcomes of this fall’s elections bring to City Council one openly LGBTQ member (Miller), one of the youngest members the Council has ever seen (Kerwin), multiple first-generation immigrants (the returning Carmen Castillo and Sabina Matos), and a female majority. With that said, the representation of certain demographics doesn’t always result in immediate policy changes one might expect—earlier this month, Jo-Ann Ryan and Castillo, both current councilmembers who will be returning in the upcoming term, voted to hold for further review an agenda item that would support minority and womenowned businesses.

In many ways, Providence’s incoming City Council represents a more diverse group of members than the city has seen in the past. However, when it comes to how this will translate into its policies, only time will tell.

Miller’s main priority as a future City Council member is affordable housing. In 2017, the Providence area featured a vacancy rate of only 3 percent, tied for the lowest in New England, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While Rhode Island as a whole has been under-producing housing for years, the demand for housing has only increased, bringing costs up, too, and leaving residents of all income levels struggling to pay rent.

“Poor and working-poor people have very few options,” Miller told the Independent. “We need to think about how are we supporting those folks [who own homes and rent them out] and making sure their apartments are affordable, healthy, quality places to live.” There’s no “silver bullet” for this issue, Miller said. Instead, the affordable housing crisis is a problem that requires a multiple-strategy solution.

“We need to advocate with State Representatives and the Governor’s office to include affordable housing strategies in the state budget, and look to self-funding mechanisms for programs that provide emergency assistance to prevent homelessness,” she said, pointing CASHEN CONROY B'19 is still looking for the silver to examples adopted by neighboring states such as bullet. the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT) program in Massachusetts. She’s looking forward to discussing policies around rent stabilization, METRO

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NO STUDENT LEFT BEHIND The road to cultural competency in CAPS and beyond

One phenomenon has seen steady rise on college campuses: the influx of international students, from an average of 600,000 in 2013 to 800,000 in 2016. Since then, however, numbers saw a 3.3 percent decline, and professionals have attributed a string of reasons to explain this occurrence: issues of affordability, uncertainty about visa policies, and of course, our irresolute, clamorous President (last year, Trump reportedly called “every Chinese student in the US a spy”).

These are certainly reasons to shy away from the US. However, problems regarding the wellbeing of international students have always been constant, though historically and continuously overlooked.

After the 2016 election and the corresponding rise in stress-levels of college students across the country, especially among underrepresented and underprivileged students, pressure on campuses for better integrated counseling and psychological services (CAPS) ran high. Although appropriate changes are happening, a demographic of students that require an alternative to Western pedagogical therapy are rarely considered in these progressive movements towards integrated and diverse CAPS offices.

International student enrollment has more than tripled in the last 50 years, with nearly five percent of all students enrolled in higher-education coming from countries outside the US. The 2017 “SEVIS by the Numbers,” a biannual report on international student data, estimated 77 percent of these students to be from Asian countries; China and India continue to send the largest number of students, at 362,368 and 206,698 respectively. Concentrated and well-funded recruitment efforts from the US and corresponding countries have fueled this rise. Seeing the monetary value of international students has encouraged college advising services in China—part of the local industry of college prep that generated $4.5 billion in revenue in 2013. Brian Ong, CEO of the largest boutique counseling service, Bangdai, is transparent about their financial stability: “Some 25 percent of the people on your rich list are sending or working on sending their kids to college in the US,” states Ong. Though this conception is largely true, socioeconomic stereotypes are another generalization that works to undermine real issues facing these student groups. Not all Asian international students are wealthy; often low-income students that don’t fit under these umbrella perceptions may feel more hesitant to seek help, especially when there’s a need to look off campus for specific providers. To ensure CAPS offices are welcoming spaces for these students, schools of higher education must contend with gaps in cultural competence.

“The problem with these schools is that they make recruiting trips to China, to Asia. They want these students: they’re excellent, they pay full tuition. Along with not being offered financial aid, they are also not offered adequate services” Dr. Aleta Johnson tells the Independent. Dr. Johnson recently left her position at Brown CAPS after being brought on 25 years ago; at that time, she was the only Asian-American therapist and her addition came after student protests advocating for more Asian-American representation in CAPS. “And when teachers and supervisors are culturally sensitive,”

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she adds, “they understand that these students are reserved often due to hierarchical academic structures in China, or Korea, and are then able to offer the right kind of support.” A lack of diverse and representative providers exacerbates this dismissal of mental health support. What is needed is a system of care that is consistent, preventative, and holistic—one that can reach further than the clinical one-hour meeting.

What are ways that young people of a similar age in China relax? In what settings do they feel comfortable?

What conversation topics might make them feel more involved? +++ The road to therapy, for even domestic students, is laden with speed bumps. In February 2015, access was made easier: Yuri Tomikawa, a 2012 alumnus of Brown, founded Zencare.co, a website that connects people easily with available and compatible therapists in the Boston, New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut areas. It is often the first website students search when they aren’t able to find the right match in their CAPS office. Tomikawa credits how hopeless she felt while trying to find an available therapist as what brought her to start her business, and what pushed her to add more specific options in the search bar. Even with Zencare’s ambitious mission and the changes it’s made in CAPS accessibility, there is still a population largely not accounted for.

With Asian international students, proper help with issues of cultural isolation and social anxiety might start with a well-designed system, but does not

end there. There is still the problem with communication: Zencare’s bilingual options offer only Mandarin Chinese, Portugese, Spanish, French, and Italian, and when selected, most of these options can only be carried out by a handful of available therapists, sometimes only one––Dr. Yumin Tan is the only bilingual therapist working in Mandarin and English in the Providence area. “You will always feel more comfortable to speak and think in your native tongue” Dr. Tan tells the Independent when asked about her usual clientele, which is largely made up of Chinese international high school and graduate students.

“However, it is not only a matter of language,” she adds, “it is mostly a matter of culture, how therapists can better understand the traditions and stigmatized culture that these students often hail from.”

Traditionally, the method used in Western psychotherapy is a talk-based therapy, but the effects aren’t applicable for all: If a student is having family issues, and they come from a conservative, culturally specific Chinese household, advising them to “talk it out” and confront their family might warrant more issues for the student. Dr. Tan speaks on the importance of this distinction: “The idea of ‘speaking up’ is not the culture in the East. It's ironically this encouragement to confront your issues by ‘talking’ about it that keeps [students] from seeking help, but it is exactly this suppression that [students] feel a need to seek out help” Being sensitive to these specificities in approach not only ensures that help is given but that it’s the right kind of help. Due to mental health stigmas, Dr. Tan’s patients come largely from referrals; rarely do students approach her directly. She also notes the increase

09 NOV 2018

BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION Carly Paul

in high school students seeking help, often those in “homestays”—when an international student is paired with an American host family, usually strangers who are paired through programs similar to college recruiting programs. Usually, these homestays exponentiate feelings of isolation already felt in school. “It really makes an impact when these barriers exist for 12, 13, 16 year olds; it becomes a part of their identity development as a whole.” While some of these high schools are beginning to incorporate ESL programs into their curriculum, not much else is available to aid both a student’s academic and personal growth.

Unfortunately, knowledge of these specific barriers to access for Asian international students are not widely discussed and conversations often surface only after tragic events, when these issues can no longer be overlooked. After the public suicide of Brown University doctoral student Hyoun Ju Sohn in 2015, the bleak realities that these international students face rang clear. Dr. Johnson remembers receiving various referrals in the months after, even Korean graduate students coming to her directly with similar fears stirred up by the incident. “Surprisingly, in cross-experience analysis of Asian Americans and Asian international students and suicides, the biggest predictor of suicidal behavior is actually the perception of assimilation, not exactly depression. There is this sort of insidious impact that a false sense of belonging and a slow drip of micro-aggression has on [these students].” Dr Johnson discounts the Model Minority Myth, as it is too often used to rationalize campus suicides among international students. Instead of placing the blame on a lack of support, or even issues with assimilation, often suicides get pinned on high-pressure “tiger moms” or the failure on the part of these students to speak out about their struggles. The former showcases the dangers of certain stereotypes and the latter reveals an ignorance of pedagogies outside of accepted Western ones. +++ In the 2017 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH), social anxiety saw an expedited rise within 2016-17. Last year, the CAPS office at RISD saw over 500 students, almost 23 percent of the student population––a record high that’s left Shauna Summers, CAPS director, proud and hopeful. However, the percentage of international students, and people of color in general, that seek CAPS has not mirrored this increase, though often these groups are directly affected by racist policies, immigration reform, and divisions in the US political climate. That same report shows that 96,397 US students sought CAPS help while students from countries like China, India, and Japan saw 1,826, 1,295, 124 respectively. And while 67.2 percent of the white student demographic have utilized campus help, only 9.3 percent of black students and 8 percent of Asians and Asian Americans have done the same. Most of the time, diversity in CAPS staff is the only way for underrepresented, underprivileged groups to feel safe in seeking help.

Brown and RISD have made desperate strides towards overturning systemic issues. However, playing catch-up has placed increased pressure on the few therapists of color. “People of color don't always stay in these positions because it's difficult to be a person of color in certain places. It's a lot of pressure and a lot more work.” Nikole Barnes tells the Independent.

She has been the Assistant Director of RISD CAPS since June, focusing on training. Along with her fulltime position, she feels it’s vital to keep her private practice open. Though sometimes she only sees five patients a year, being one of the only women of color available, Dr. Barnes feels it is her duty to cover all her bases. This is the reality for many bilingual and POC therapists. Underrepresentation often forces them

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to spread themselves thin: “We can't always say no because there's no one else for these students to go to.”

Similarly, Dr. Johnson, “only felt okay to leave Brown CAPS and return to private practice when she was no longer the only one representing for Asian and Asian Americans.”

Aside from Dr. Tan and Dr. Johnson, Dr. John Lee is the only other Asian American provider in the Providence area (though he is not on Zencare and, thus, is only available to a select few). Having frequently worked with students for their entire academic careers, all three doctors observe a similar trend: motivations to secure knowledge and participation with CAPS on college campuses should be done so collaboratively with these students. Parents of international students, especially those hailing from a society of high-pressure academic competition, will warm up to the idea of “seeking help” when it’s done as a way to further their child’s academic success. These expectations from parents are often perceieved as unreasonable but should come with an asterisk: the dismissal of CAPS comes from a ignorance towards this type of help, not from an educated rejection, as it is not widely offered in most Asian countries.

Dr. Johnson kept these goals in mind when working on outreach during her time at Brown: “These students are not going to come to counseling but they will through workshops, or events that are advertised as furthering their success professionally and academically,” she says. Shifts in approach like that are ways CAPS can work to validate, not pathologize, their culture.

“International students are coming from a culture that is largely homogeneous––sure, there are hierarchies with class––but they aren't used to being denigrated for having slanted eyes, or the amount of stereotyping,” adds Dr. Johnson, “and it’s not easy to adjust to that.”

She noticed that often students were looking for other ways to justify their culture, often inadvertently locking themselves into homogenous groups. Xin Er Jiang, now in her last year at RISD, mentioned the pressure to get involved in relationships, both romantic and friendly.

“By observing my high school peers who came to study in the US, a common cure to loneliness and cultural insecurities is getting into relationships. And most of the time, it’s only with other international students,” they told the Independent. Though these are valid ways to reduce isolation and ones that have brought levels of comfort to these students, they are limited solutions to deep-seated, systemic issues. The roots of these feelings are often ambiguous, and adjustment has to happen on so many levels. As a consequence, students like Jiang are often left to figure these uncertainties out on their own: “I don't know if RISD is causing it, or being away in a foreign country is causing it, or that's just the normal essence of human life.” +++ While often counseling services can feel as if they are working against the clock, it’s important that all therapists, regardless of race and culture, pursue their clinical pedagogy with a constant critical eye. Though Asian international students are disproportionately absent in CAPS discourse, cultural incompetency and the lack of representation in mental health services have proven to negatively affect students from all different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultures. Progressive interventions in campus counseling and psychological services should not come as a response to emergent circumstances, but as a pre-existing system of support, ensuring aid is available and appropriate whenever needed.

WEN ZHUANG R‘19 is still trying to “connect” with her therapist.

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BY Bria Metzger ILLUSTRATION Halle Krieger DESIGN Bethany Hung

here we collide

Worry me at the tail edge of torn seams, Locked into conversation with the neighbors again About the man who met the telephone pole And lived. Heels sink into flattened grass and we Trawl the mud shores of memory: If you heard the frail shout of shattered glass Or felt splintered wood curl into bones And fall asleep.

Fray me cautious, a collector of fine fragments, Holding plastic between fingers like a burnt-out cigarette, The spark Flashing like a widow’s candlelit window finally Going dark, knowing Just a breath could gust anyone out.

He was asleep when oil billowed behind him, A trial separation of codependent parts, The art of letting go learned in the bitter pause before The ground breaks: What spaces there are, that we Have never touched.

the pool was not turned off

breathing for star magnolias make / no ripple when they let their / petals drop and I have ever stirred / the water gently now / summer storms tremble and send / a shiver through open breezes / shuttered gates grown cold from lack of / working hands no one / will keep the rain / outside if it longs to warp the wood grain no one / prepares for the weather. the ritual leaving / storm-drawn stars brushed back morning pools / to rainwater / too soon. pretenders body castaways like leaves spinning under the surface tension / spiders walk on air / grey-thin as a sliver moon cuts a smile where they hang eyes eight / jewels upon / the night sleeps restless.

cold hands

Wait by the windowsill until settled dust turns sunset-rosy as those chapped lips December cold.

Pick an apple from the bough, a host of sweetness for your tongue alone split arsenic seeds like lace golden pale, the other shutters. You insist on keeping cold indoors.

Leave only what’s heavy, live with eyes closed by sleep and blackout curtains spit the seeds from between your teeth — This is freedom, freedom, and The cathexis of cold hands.

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09 NOV 2018

LEARNING FACES The uncanny horror of deepfake videos

BY Mina Rhee ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

“Will ‘Deepfakes’ Disrupt the Midterm Election?” reads a recent headline from Wired. Two weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled “Will Deep-Fake Technology Destroy Democracy?” Both articles are representative of the alarm that media and political organizations are expressing about the potential for ‘deepfakes’ to create and spread inflammatory fake news that has no way of being verified. ‘Deepfakes’ are videos that use deep learning (a type of machine learning) to graft different faces onto videos, and were created by and named after Reddit user “deepfakes,” who used machine learning technology paste the faces of female celebrities onto pornographic videos. Now, however, the alarm over deepfakes is primarily about their political and national security implications; the Times article, with many others, worries about the potential for deepfakes to create a world “in which it would be impossible, literally, to tell what is real from what is invented” — where manipulated videos of political figures saying inflammatory falsehoods can sway public opinion before they are shown to be fraudulent, or political figures can deny that real videos are accurate. Despite these worries, it seems like the most serious consumers of deepfakes on the internet use them for pornography––there are thousands of videos on multiple websites dedicated to deepfakes of faked celebrity pornography, but not a single instance of a deepfake political video that has been distributed widely as part of any misinformation campaign.

Interestingly, the technology behind deepfakes was used by computer scientists and academics long before a Reddit user decided to harness it for pornographic videos. In an interview with Motherboard, user “deepfakes” claimed that the deep learning model he used to create his videos was similar to one developed by researchers at NVIDIA, a technology company that sells computing hardware and software. When researchers like the ones at NVIDIA published their results, they included examples of images changed by deep learning neural networks: dogs whose breeds have been swapped, photographs in the style of different painters, a summer day turned into a snowy one––whimsical examples that are fun, but inspire little other reaction.

In sharp contrast, watching a convincing deepfake provokes a knee-jerk horror––these videos are almost completely believable, like stumbling upon any clip while browsing through YouTube or Facebook. Unlike the sterile images of morphed landscapes in academic papers, deepfakes viscerally demonstrate that neural networks have the power to create a convincing reality.

The “deep” of deepfakes comes from deep learning, a form of machine learning that uses multiple layers of data manipulation for a computer model to learn how to perform a specific task. During training, a computer model will be tested on sample data to improve on a task. The model performs a series of transformations on the input and produces an output, THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and, based on the accuracy of the output, makes small changes to its transformation procedure. The idea is that through hundreds or thousands of iterations, the model will eventually figure out the correct transformation from input to output. As the name implies, deep learning uses multiple layers of transformations, each abstracting on its previous abstraction, breaking down the input into data points that the model deems relevant. These layers of transformations are called neural networks, because this process of abstraction is meant to mirror the way cells in the brain process information.

Nobody tells these neural networks how to make a correct deepfake—instead, the model learns for itself through endless trials in training. The most common way to generate deepfakes is using auto encoding, which ‘decodes’ a face to its generalities, and then ‘encodes’ it with the specifics of another person’s face.

The layers of the neural network figure out how to strip a face into universal components––its expression, the lighting cast onto it, its angle––then also figures out how to build another person’s face onto this frame.

Many aspects of this process are still unknown; the actual information about how faces are stripped then rebuilt is hidden in the layers of neural network training that creates the deepfakes.

Neural networks are fundamentally unknowable because the information they encode is so abstracted that it can’t be translated into something its creators can understand. It is terrifying that unknowable abstractions—that we currently have no way of reading—can produce images that pass for reality. Usually deepfake videos seem slightly ‘off,’ but it is difficult to point to an exact cause the way one can point to a stray line or fuzzy border when looking at a bad Photoshop. Identifying and tracing a flaw requires knowing how the neural network functions. +++

public GitHub repository, which is a public codebase, allows anyone to set up their own neural networks to swap faces of their choice on image or video. Included in these code files is a manifesto, whose first line is “Faceswap is not porn.” The manifesto goes on to highlight the philosophy behind deepfakes as well as some ethical guidelines for its users. The first statement is obviously true, but also necessary, because while faceswaps are indeed not pornography, the specific applications of deepfakes definitely began as pornography, with the codebase still thanking and crediting user “deepfakes” for making faceswapping technology accessible to more casually interested people outside of academia.

Another way to read the word “deepfake” is for “deep” to modify “fake,” — the deepest fake, the most fake. Although deepfakes that place a celebrity’s face onto a pornstar’s body are a step up from photoshopping them onto still images, the consumers of the videos know that they are still false. The fact that deepfakes are so unnerving reflects how strongly images are tied to our notion of reality: We accept videos or pictures of an event as proof of the event itself, so being confronted with an image that is clearly fake creates an extended sense of cognitive dissonance, as we try to resolve the believability of the video with the impossibility of its context. It’s also why deepfakes are probably more potent as pornography than they are as political weapons. Both deepfakes and pornography are forms that accept that the image viewed on the screen isn’t real but fantastical. Deepfakes drive the “fake” of fake celebrity porn videos somewhere deeper, so that while the fantasy holds at the level of technical image, the sense of unreality is still heightened because it is so convincing. Not all faceswaps are porn, but all deepfakes are pornographic in their own way, fantasy images that insist on their reality, created by an opaque structure that can understand and create our own faces better than we can.

Reddit user “deepfakes” began posting videos of hardcore pornography with the bodies of pornstars and MINA RHEE B’20 deleted her Snapchat after it added faces of female celebrities onto the site in 2017. These the faceswap filter. videos garnered attention when Motherboard published an article titled “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked.” In a r/Deepfakes subreddit that grew to 90,000 followers, other users posted their own fake celebrity pornography they created using the same method. Following the outrage in response to deepfakes, Reddit, Pornhub, Twitter, and other websites banned deepfakes in early 2018, and both the subreddit and user are gone from Reddit. The majority of such websites released statements about how such content violated their policies on “involuntary pornography,” as a spokesperson from Reddit stated.

Although the original “deepfakes” thread and user have been banned from Reddit, using deepfake technology is still possible for anyone interested. A SCIENCE & TECH

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WHY AM I LONELYFOR LONELY LONESOME LONESOME LOVE? LOVE? Emotion and spectacle in Mitski’s Be the Cowboy I remember a particular moment from my first night on Brown's campus this September when my entire body was enveloped by a state of pure panic. I didn’t move.

I didn’t make a sound. I just felt the laughably simple emotion of helplessness reducing me to a state of overly-alert nothingness. Not a single person in this town cared for me, and the expanse of my loneliness and fear became a darkness that manifested in my dreams while somehow spilling over into my reality. In the dizzying heat of the late summer, I found myself maneuvering through a vat of isolation unlike one I had ever experienced before with the clinging optimism that the pain would pass, or perhaps even morph into self-reflective growth. So what did I do? I opened a window and put on Mitski Miyawaki’s new album, one that dips into every facet of the human vulnerability that emerges from isolation, yearning, and fear of deficiency.

Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s fifth studio album, challenges us to revise our thoughts about ‘sad music.’

Music that bemoans and laughs at the woes that come with having an unrequited crush doesn’t have to be juvenile. In the song “Nobody,” Mitski croons about her lonesomeness, while dragging the listener through disco-esque waves of irresistibly fun musical flourish.

Superimposed onto an intensely upbeat backdrop, she cries “Nobody, nobody, nobody” in a pattern that mirrors a feverish breakdown she herself experienced when she found herself in a state of complete isolation from human contact. As Mitski told music website Genius, “I am too proud to be hysterical to other people but the chorus ‘Nobody’ was literally me in a semifugue state on my hands and knees on the floor just crying and just repeating the word, ‘nobody,’ and then I don’t know. I was like, ‘Let me use this pain and exploit it for my money.'” It’s her ability to transform raw emotion into spectacle that charms us into welcoming our own vulnerabilities. In lines like “Cause nobody butters me up like you/And nobody fucks me like me,” from “Lonesome Love,” Mitski showcases self-conscious, navel-gazey lyrics that carry the capacity for comedic self-deprecation —lock, stock, and barrel.

Mitski’s Be the Cowboy exposes the grotesquely romantic qualities of loneliness and imperfection.

Unlike Mitski’s previous albums, such as Bury Me at Makeout Creek, which created a violent orchestra of distorted sound, Be the Cowboy has a sonic clarity that allows for her voice to shudder and crack with a genuineness that reaches out and implicates the listener as a witness to her woe. Upon playing the album, we adopt the role of active participants in Mitski’s own lamentation; her desires for human contact and validation become just as much ours as they are hers. Every track employs an almost jarring lyrical literalism (her lyrics read almost as a diary entry), making the listening experience all the more intimate, while paradoxically providing a sense of haziness (created by her use of haunting sound elements) that only makes the distinction between Mistki’s art and reality all the foggier.

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Mitksi’s vulnerability is empowering; she allows us to see the depths of her self-destructive emotions, and allows us to move on. By turning her emotion into a spectacle for coping, Mitski enables us to recognize our own anguish, laugh at it, and overcome. This is how we become the cowboy. +++ Be the Cowboy wouldn’t exist without loss, and Mitski’s own elevation of music over her emotions. The first track, “Geyser,” opens with a haunting cascade of organ pipes, over which Mitski’s pleading voice seems to call from a distance, like the life you’ve surely left behind. “You’re my number one/ You’re the one I want,” she chants eerily as the sonic space begins to glitch and morph. Instead of decoding this complex imagery, however, Mitski revels in its ambiguity: “I think this is one of my vaguest songs,” she said.

“Usually my songs have a narrative of some sort.

But this song is all feeling.” The choice to begin the album with “Geyser,” in all of its haziness, is a direct commentary on the cohesiveness of the album as a whole—a statement of its artistic merit as a work that required significant loss in its very existence.

Brilliantly echoing its own title, the song begins to ramp up, finally bursting into a frenzied declaration, “Though I’m a geyser/ Bubbling from below/ Hear it call, hear it call/ Hear it call to me.” This vivid image of the geyser emanating frames Mitski as an almost divine source of creative energy. But for Mitski, her creative process not only gives her energy but depletes her. She nods to the sacrifice required by her career, but chooses to continue, as she “can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Explorations of love, loss, and loneliness can be trite, but Mitski turns the idea of emotion on its head by reconciling the all-too-familiar confines of solitude and the humor to be found within frantic desperation.

In “Me and My Husband,” Mitski fleetingly imagines a stable life, symbolized by a heteronormative marriage, while also mocking this desire. “But me and my husband/ We are doing better,” she affirms, “It’s always been just him and me together.” In the obvious naivete of the song, Mitski underscores a pitiful voice with imagery of 50s Americana. The listener can imagine Mitski as just another Stepford wife, baking a pie to the sing-song echo of “Honey, I’m home!”

Creating this character of the ideal husband, poking fun at the institution of marriage, Mitski sings

“And I’m the idiot with the painted face/ In the corner, taking up space/ But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved.”

BY Iman Husain ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana

word “love” cracks, becomes desperate. Through the supposed hilarity, and an upbeat sonic background, she tempts us to indulge in the delicious coupling of comedy and tragedy.

By the end of the album, Mitski beckons us to look back on lost pasts while simultaneously pushing us to accept the growth that comes with inevitable change. In “Old Friend,” Mitksi welcomes the twinge of nostalgia that comes with the revisiting of paths untaken, begging, “Meet me at Blue Diner/ I’ll take anything you want to give me, baby.” While “Old Friend” invites us to sit in a diner booth with Mitski and fall into an unending wistfulness, “Two Slow Dancers” asks us to push past this nostalgia, filling us with the realization that we must move forward. “It would be a hundred times easier/ If we were young again/ But as it is/ And it is/ To think that we could stay the same,” Mitski sings, bringing about bitter yet profound acceptance of helplessness to the passage of time. We can never remain stagnant, and, in Mitski’s words, we all “have to go home and go back to [our] lives.” +++ Mitski’s portrayal of insecurity, vulnerability, and desolation are haunting because they are so painfully familiar. However, we must be careful in watering down the value of Be the Cowboy to a collection of “depression anthems.” Save your tears. “Yes, it’s personal,” Mitski said to Pitchfork, “But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.”

Although it’s true that the achingly lovelorn tracks on the album expose her unraveling, spiraling emotions, Mitski’s overarching reclamation of vulnerability is nothing but empowering. She nods to the validity of fully feeling the depths of self-destructive emotions, and openly uses those same emotions as a tool to create something even deeper.

Mitski revels in the unashamed evocation of the types of feelings we oftentimes bury, allowing for an even greater overcoming. When prompted about the album’s title, Mitski stated that it draws from her admiration for an “artist [she] really loved who used to have such a cowboy swagger.” She reflected on this admiration, and reckoned, “I could just be my own cowboy.” Hank Williams, a famous cowboy, once wistfully and sorrowfully crooned, “I’m so lonely I could cry.” Mitski challenges the iconic man of “Lovesick Blues” in a bullfight of emotions, not in a gendered ‘who’s more cowboy’-ness, but rather to actually feel, to cry. She lassos us off the edge of feeling, to in fact feel deeply and completely.

IMAN HUSAIN B’22 doesn’t really like Mitski There is no husband, and even if there was, there anymore. wouldn’t be any love; Mitski’s enunciation of the

09 NOV 2018

Follow the instructions below to make your own Special Edition Mini Indy. This exact miniature replica of this week’s College Hill Independent just like a real Indy but portable and quick to read! Use it to decorate the home of a small indoor pet, or slip it into your pocket and carry it with you always.

FRIDAY

Aleppo Sweets POP-UP @Stock Culinary Goods! // 756 Hope Street // 3-6PM

Aleppo Sweets is a new Syrian pastry shop slated to open on Ives Street at some point in the near future. Until then, the refugee-owned small business will be hosting several pop-up sales throughout the city—this Friday, baker Youssef Akhtarin will be selling some killer baklava among the petite forks, mandolins, and pressure cookers at Stock Culinary Goods. Come support Youssef and learn more about his future plans!

09 NOV 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 07

MINI INDY

THE LIST

SATURDAY

Fine Furnishings Show // 10AM-6PM // Waterfire Arts Center (475 Valley Street) // $10

Gawk at some beautiful chairs and tables inside of a warehouse. Included in the price of admission is entry into a door prize lottery! This LW hopes that the furniture moguls throwing this event literalize the idea of a door prize by gifting the winner a physical door.

WaterFire Salute to Veterans Brazier Dedications // 5-11PM // 100 Canal Walk

At the second List-endorsed, WaterFire-sponsored event of the day, attendees are encouraged to ‘honor a veteran by lighting a brazier.’ More like, honor a female veteran by lighting a brassiere!

SUNDAY

From Scratch PVD // 7-9PM // Black Box Theater, 95 Empire Street

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

MAKE YOUR OWN

1.

FROM SCRATCH is an ongoing experiment in interactive black-box theater performance. All attendees are invited to take the stage, test out their nascent performance ‘ideas,’ and listen to audience input on how the plausible show could one day be improved. This is also the model that the Indy employs at its weekly crit session, when we review and give feedback to our own newspaper. Except the Indy doesn’t hold staff meetings inside of a large, black box. But we should!

MONDAY

Ernesto Zedillo—President of Mexico (1994-2000) // De Ciccio Auditorium, Solomon Center for Teaching (79 Waterman Street) // 5-6PM

Instructions:

SUBMIT TO THE INDY → THEINDY@GMAIL.COM MUST BE A CURRENT RISD OR BROWN STUDENT.

Zedillo was Mexico’s president during some of the first years of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); now he’s Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and on the board at Citibank and BP. If you ever wanted to know what a technocrat is, look no further.

Appropriately, his talk, “Challenging the Challengers of Globalization,” buries the politics of its title under a pile of nonsense. Consider this, at best, a view into world finance from one of its architects.

TUESDAY

1. Cut out each page spread along the dotted line

Learn to Solder with the Educato // AS220 (115 Empire Street) // 6-9PM

Don’t let the straightforward title of this workshop fool you: this is a tool for revolution. Specifically, against the Genius Bar. This will teach you how to solder, AKA “make simple repairs on electronics that were once thought broken for good.” Throw off the tyranny of the warranty and rise up!

2. Fold in half horizontally

WEDNESDAY

Forrest Gander with Cole Swenson and Patricio Ferrari // Riffraff Bookstore and Bar (60 Valley Street, Unit 107A) // 7-8PM

Forrest Gander, a poet with a keen eye for ecological and cultural history as well as his own emotional life, is a treasure. His new book, “Be With,” is a testament to his late wife C.D. Wright—herself a master in her own right—as well as his mother, on top of reflections on the US-Mexico border and St. John of the Cross. This will surely be a beautiful reading.

3. Lay the pages on top of each other in the order indicated. Make sure to stack them with the right-sides facing up. You may refer to the full scale issue for guidance.

Tolerably Black: Artist-Led Tour and Panel Discussion // Granoff Center for the Arts (154 Angell Street) // 4:30-7PM

Artist Aretha Busby created this exhibition as both a reflection on the experiences of her great-greatgreat-great grandmother and on how a history of enslavement suffuses contemporary life. It sounds like the panel following her tour of the show—coordinated by representatives from the Center for Reconciliation and The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown—will be structured completely non-hierarchically, which may be a powerful opportunity to hear from more community perspectives than you usually might at other artist talks.

4. Affix the pages together using one or two staples, as preferred.

THURSDAY

The Art of Race—Decorative Arts // RISD Museum (20 North Main Street) // 6-7:30PM

2.

3.

WEEK IN PUPPETS

The influence of decorative arts rarely get their due in a wider canon of art history, and when they do, it’s often relegated to white fake socialists in the Arts and Crafts movement. This will be rare look into the construction of RISD’s archive—and, perhaps, into its absences—focused on the racial history of decorative arts (costumes and textiles) in the museum’s collection.

WHY AM I LONELY LONELYFOR LONESOME LONESOME LOVE? LOVE?

BY Ella Comberg, Alina Kulman DESIGN Amos Jackson DANCE LIKE NOBODY'S WATCHING “This is interpretive dance—also known as Mooch Moves—for my time in the White House.”

Last Monday, the New York Post published a video of the former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci doing a dramatic retelling—in dance!—of his tumultuous ten-day tenure in the White House in July, 2017. Although one year later, standing in front of a white background at The Post’s studios in a well-tailored blue blazer and just-casual-enough black sneakers, he insists that he had the job for eleven days, not ten. Either way, he was fired on July 31st for insulting other members of the White House, in an attempt by Chief of Staff John Kelly to return some semblance of order to the Trump Administration.

In the video, Scaramucci does a different dance move for each of the eleven (ten?) days of his stint as Communications Director. Day One, he says to the camera, was “Mooch cleaning house.” He makes some terribly awkward sweeping and dusting motions over the cheery electronic harpsichord music in the background. Day Four: “I’m with the Boy Scouts,” he says with a salute, referring to his visit with Trump to the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia. “My son is born, I’m missing that,” he continues, rocking an imaginary baby and drawing a single tear from his eye with his finger. “That’s a very big bummer for me.” Big bummer, indeed. According to Page Six reporting, he texted his wife, “Congratulations, I’ll pray for our child," after her delivery, clearly exuding the simultaneous excitement and distress of a man missing the birth of his son.

“The Mooch” (as he likes to call himself ) has previously tried to claim that he’s uninterested in media attention. In the now-infamous interview with the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on Day Five—the conversation that got him fired—Scaramucci said he was different from the attention-craving Steve Bannon because he was, well, not trying to suck on his own genitalia. But Scaramucci’s bizarre dance stunt, along with appearances on every major TV news outlet, are all part of the press tour for his new book, Trump: The Blue Collar President. In the book, he praises Trump for showing him the plight of the American middle class, because Trump has clearly shown us how getting “a small loan of a million dollars” (or more, per recent New York Times reporting) from your father, and not paying your contractors could put any billionaire real estate developer deeply in touch with the working man.

Scaramucci has joined the ranks of other former Trump officials who, after leaving the White House,

now claim to be in on the joke. In a surprise appearance at last year’s Emmys, Scaramucci’s predecessor, Sean Spicer, announced to the cheers of the crowd that “this will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period.” Omarosa Manigault Newman, former director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, went on Colbert in March, and she laughed about the doublespeak of calling Trump’s support for white supremacists after Charlottesville “racial, not racist.”

These officials feel they have license to lie while in office, but once they leave, they can assure everyone that they never really meant what they were saying.

As for Scaramucci, he’s still an outspoken supporter of the Trump administration and its policies. But doing these kinds of videos and media appearances gives his message of support enough of a wink and a nudge to ensure wealthy New York finance-types will still come to his book party.

To represent the end of his time in the White House, Scaramucci for Day Twelve (which was, in reality, Day Eleven) gets down on one knee and puts his hands in a prayer position. “Thank you God that it’s over,” he says, almost somberly. Hopefully, two Novembers from now we’ll all be saying the same thing.

-AK GRITTY IS NOT A WORKER When I opened Twitter one day in late September and learned of Gritty’s debut, it felt like the first piece of good news in weeks. Some intern at the Philadelphia Flyers, it seemed, had pitched a nonsensical new mascot for the city’s hockey team and, with presumably no better options, the higher-ups at the Flyers gave Gritty the stamp of approval.

To me, lying in bed that morning, Gritty was nothing more than a big orange guy who didn’t look like he’d been okayed by a focus-group. There’s no premise or gimmick to him: he’s got orange fur and hair, bulbous googly eyes, a hockey jersey and helmet, and a pearshaped figure uncannily similar to that of the Phanatic, the Phillies’ mascot. He’s dressed like a hockey player, but really, he just looks like a red-bearded hockey fan pounding buds in the back row of the Wells Fargo Center. Indeed, Gritty felt like someone I knew growing up in Philadelphia—maybe I’d shared a wooder ice or heavily cheesed steak with him after school—and my

the distinction between Mistki’s art and reality all the foggier. Mitksi’s vulnerability is empowering; she allows us to see the depths of her self-destructive emotions, and allows us to move on. By turning her emotion into a spectacle for coping, Mitski enables us to recognize our When I arrived on Brown’s campus this September, I own anguish, laugh at it, and overcome. This is how we remember a particular moment on the first night when become the cowboy. my entire body was enveloped by a state of pure panic. I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound. I just felt the laugh+++ ably simple emotion of helplessness reducing me to a state of overly-alert nothingness. Not a single person in Be the Cowboy wouldn’t exist without loss, and Mitski’s this town cared for me, and the expanse of my loneli- own elevation of music over her emotions. The first ness and fear became a darkness that manifested in my track, “Geyser,” opens with a haunting cascade of organ dreams while somehow spilling over into my reality. In pipes, over which Mitski’s pleading voice seems to call the dizzying heat of the late summer, I found myself from a distance, like the life you’ve surely left behind. maneuvering through a vat of isolation unlike one I “You’re my number one/ You’re the one I want,” she had ever experienced before with the clinging opti- chants eerily as the sonic space begins to glitch and mism that the pain would pass, or perhaps even morph morph. Instead of decoding this complex imagery, into self-reflective growth. So what did I do? I opened however, Mitski revels in its ambiguity: “I think this a window and put on Mitski Miyawaki’s new album, is one of my vaguest songs,” she said. “Usually my one that dips into every facet of the human vulnera- songs have a narrative of some sort. But this song is all bility that emerges from isolation, yearning, and fear of feeling.” The choice to begin the album with “Geyser,” deficiency. in all of its haziness, is a direct commentary on the Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s fifth studio album, chal- cohesiveness of the album as a whole—a statement lenges us to revise our thoughts about ‘sad music.’ of its artistic merit as a work that required significant Music that bemoans and laughs at the woes that come loss in its very existence. Brilliantly echoing its own with having an unrequited crush doesn’t have to be title, the song begins to ramp up, finally bursting into a juvenile. In the song “Nobody,” Mitski croons about frenzied declaration, “Though I’m a geyser/ Bubbling her lonesomeness, while dragging the listener through from below/ Hear it call, hear it call/ Hear it call to me.” disco-esque waves of irresistibly fun musical flourish. This vivid image of the geyser emanating frames Mitski Superimposed onto an intensely upbeat backdrop, as an almost divine source of creative energy. But for she cries “Nobody, nobody, nobody” in a pattern that Mitski, her creative process not only gives her energy mirrors a feverish breakdown she herself experienced but depletes her. She nods to the sacrifice required when she found herself in a state of complete isola- by her career, but chooses to continue, as she “can’t tion from human contact. As Mitski told music website imagine doing anything else.”

Genius, “I am too proud to be hysterical to other people Explorations of love, loss, and loneliness can be but the chorus ‘Nobody’ was literally me in a semi- trite, but Mitski turns the idea of emotion on its head fugue state on my hands and knees on the floor just by reconciling the all-too-familiar confines of solitude crying and just repeating the word, ‘nobody,’ and then I and the humor to be found within frantic desperation. don’t know. I was like, ‘Let me use this pain and exploit In “Me and My Husband,” Mitski fleetingly imagines a it for my money.'” It’s her ability to transform raw stable life, symbolized by a heteronormative marriage, emotion into spectacle that charms us into welcoming while also mocking this desire. “But me and my our own vulnerabilities. In lines like “Cause nobody husband/ We are doing better,” she affirms, “It’s always butters me up like you/And nobody fucks me like me,” been just him and me together.” In the obvious naivete from “Lonesome Love,” Mitski showcases self-con- of the song, Mitski underscores a pitiful voice with scious, navel-gazey lyrics that carry the capacity for imagery of 50s Americana. The listener can imagine comedic self-deprecation —lock, stock, and barrel.

Mitski as just another Stepford wife, baking a pie to the Mitski’s Be the Cowboy exposes the grotesquely sing-song echo of “Honey, I’m home!” Creating this romantic qualities of loneliness and imperfection. character of the ideal husband, poking fun at the instiUnlike Mitski’s previous albums, such as Bury Me at tution of marriage, Mitski sings Makeout Creek, which created a violent orchestra of distorted sound, Be the Cowboy has a sonic clarity that “And I’m the idiot with the painted face/ allows for her voice to shudder and crack with a genuineness that reaches out and implicates the listener In corner, taking up space/ But when he as a witness to her woe. Upon playing the album, we adopt the role of active participants in Mitski’s own walks in, I am loved, I am loved.” lamentation; her desires for human contact and validation become just as much ours as they are hers. There is no husband, and even if there was, there Every track employs an almost jarring lyrical literalism wouldn’t be any love; Mitski’s enunciation of the (her lyrics read almost as a diary entry), making the word “love” cracks, becomes desperate. Through the listening experience all the more intimate, while para- supposed hilarity, and an upbeat sonic background, doxically providing a sense of haziness (created by she tempts us to indulge in the delicious coupling of her use of haunting sound elements) that only makes comedy and tragedy.

-EC

PERSONAL EFFECTS

BY Liby Hays

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

15

here we collide

ARTS

By the end of the album, Mitski beckons us to look back on lost pasts while simultaneously pushing us to accept the growth that comes with inevitable change. In “Old Friend,” Mitksi welcomes the twinge of nostalgia that comes with the revisiting of paths untaken, begging, “Meet me at Blue Diner/ I’ll take anything you want to give me, baby.” While “Old Friend” invites us to sit in a diner booth with Mitski and fall into an unending wistfulness, “Two Slow Dancers” asks us to push past this nostalgia, filling us with the realization that we must move forward. “It would be a hundred times easier/ If we were young again/ But as it is/ And it is/ To think that we could stay the same,” Mitski sings, bringing about bitter yet profound acceptance of helplessness to the passage of time. We can never remain stagnant, and, in Mitski’s words, we all “have to go home and go back to [our] lives.” +++ Mitski’s portrayal of insecurity, vulnerability, and desolation are haunting because they are so painfully familiar. However, we must be careful in watering down the value of Be the Cowboy to a collection of “depression anthems.” Save your tears. “Yes, it’s personal,” Mitski said to Pitchfork, “But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.” Although it’s true that the achingly lovelorn tracks on the album expose her unraveling, spiraling emotions, Mitski’s overarching reclamation of vulnerability is nothing but empowering. She nods to the validity of fully feeling the depths of self-destructive emotions, and openly uses those same emotions as a tool to create something even deeper.

Mitski revels in the unashamed evocation of the types of feelings we oftentimes bury, allowing for an even greater overcoming. When prompted about the album’s title, Mitski stated that it draws from her admiration for an “artist [she] really loved who used to have such a cowboy swagger.” She reflected on this admiration, and reckoned, “I could just be my own cowboy.”

Hank Williams, a famous cowboy, once wistfully and sorrowfully crooned, “I’m so lonely I could cry.” Mitski challenges the iconic man of “Lovesick Blues” in a bullfight of emotions, not in a gendered ‘who’s more cowboy’-ness, but rather to actually feel, to cry. She lassos us off the edge of feeling, to in fact feel deeply and completely.

IMAN HUSAIN B’22 doesn’t really like Mitski anymore.

09 NOV 2018

5.

BY Bria Metzger ILLUSTRATION Halle Krieger DESIGN Bethany Hung

Worry me at the tail edge of torn seams, Locked into conversation with the neighbors again About the man who met the telephone pole And lived. Heels sink into flattened grass and we Trawl the mud shores of memory: If you heard the frail shout of shattered glass Or felt splintered wood curl into bones And fall asleep.

Fray me cautious, a collector of fine fragments, Holding plastic between fingers like a burnt-out cigarette, The spark Flashing like a widow’s candlelit window finally Going dark, knowing Just a breath could gust anyone out.

He was asleep when oil billowed behind him, A trial separation of codependent parts, The art of letting go learned in the bitter pause before The ground breaks: What spaces there are, that we Have never touched.

the pool was not turned off

breathing for star magnolias make / no ripple when they let their / petals drop and I have ever stirred / the water gently now / summer storms tremble and send / a shiver through open breezes / shuttered gates grown cold from lack of / working hands no one / will keep the rain / outside if it longs to warp the wood grain no one / prepares for the weather. the ritual leaving / storm-drawn stars brushed back morning pools / to rainwater / too soon. pretenders body castaways like leaves spinning under the surface tension / spiders walk on air / grey-thin as a sliver moon cuts a smile where they hang eyes eight / jewels upon / the night sleeps restless.

cold hands

Wait by the windowsill until settled dust turns sunset-rosy as those chapped lips December cold.

Pick an apple from the bough, a host of sweetness for your tongue alone split arsenic seeds like lace golden pale, the other shutters. You insist on keeping cold indoors.

Leave only what’s heavy, live with eyes closed by sleep and blackout curtains spit the seeds from between your teeth — This is freedom, freedom, and The cathexis of cold hands.

LITERARY

07 NOV 2018

SEND YOUR MINI INDY WITH A MESSAGE am p

13

st

4.

BY Iman Husain ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana

Emotion and spectacle in Mitski’s Be the Cowboy

god, did it bring a nostalgic tear to my eye.

And so, when the national media noticed Gritty, all I could think was: get your hands off my city. To the New Yorker, Gritty was absurd, but to Philadelphians, he was just one of us. In a city where men post up on street corners to go fishing in the sewer; where it’s commonplace for bus drivers to stop traffic to have conversations with one another; where local hero Meek Mill was helicoptered into the Sixers’ locker room to hype up the team just hours after he was released from jail; and where the cancelation of an annual wing-eating contest recently incited public outcry (#RIPWingBowl), Gritty’s own chaos makes perfect sense.

But for Gritty, like the rest of us, with age came politicization. On September 26, two days after Gritty came onto the scene, Jacobin (the “leading voice of the American Left”) tweeted “Gritty is a worker.” Soon after, Donald Trump visited Philadelphia and Gritty appeared on a number of protesters’ picket signs. And with that, Gritty was swiftly concretized as a symbol of leftism nationwide. But as soon as memes emerged depicting Gritty calling for the fall of the state and chopping off Pepe the Frog’s head in a guillotine, so too did the conservative backlash. On October 7, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled “Antifa Appropriates a Creepy Mascot” with the subtitle “Keep your Marxist hands off Gritty. He belongs to Philly.”

While the Indy can get behind Gritty’s politics, this reporter—the Indy’s resident Philadelphian—must regrettably side with the Journal on one front: Gritty belongs to Philly. At the end of the day, his incorporation into socialist politics doesn’t really add up. He’s the mascot of a for-profit hockey team owned by Comcast, the second largest corporation in Philadelphia, and his team is living by the anti-union creed: last week, the real-life Flyers crossed a hotel workers picket line in Boston.

Gritty doesn’t work for socialism or the Wall Street Journal, but he works for Philly. He’s a perfect storm of Comcast, cheese-wiz orange fur, and havoc. As one caller to a local public radio program speculated, Gritty might have been birthed of the scrapyard fire that took place in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia around the same time he arrived on the scene. Gritty was born in Philly and, like any loyal Flyers fan, he’ll die there too.

Garter Snake (2018) by Nicole Cochary [Brown].

Oil on canvas.

Thinking of you

1. Cut out the envelope, fold along the dotted lines, and glue the edges of the tabs together.

2. Cut out the card, fold in half, fill it with a message and mail it with your Mini Indy to someone who will care about it

PART I

M. & T. VISIT ATTLEBORO

A SERIES

M: Attleboro?

T: Attleboro apparently is the only state in the US where weed is 100% legal and has low taxes for it too, and also most of taxes go to public school funding** T: says E.! I didn’t know this T: we could go to Attleboro! it seems kind of interesting T: if its not we take another train T: I have all morning now that Im skipping Type T: we could make this trip be 5–10!

T: Do you have a camera also?

T: shall we take this one?

T: 802 [a 5:25am train] M: sounds good!!

M: i dont have a camera but have phone??

– Friday morning – T: ~Maria~ [sent at 5:29 am] – 7:13 am, M&T board the 808 train – ** upon later research: the above information is hugely exaggerated, though not completely false!

PART I

M. & T. VISIT ATTLEBORO

A SERIES

THE CHILDREN WHO LEAVE AND THE BURDEN THEY CARRY

DATA DEMOCRACY

BY Angie Kim ILLUSTRATION Grace Zhang DESIGN Christie Zhong At a typical phone banking meeting, volunteers cluster around a table or two. They all go to the website that hosts their campaign software and enter the system using their unique volunteer logins. The leader of the meeting then provides an ID for volunteers to feed into the system, which allows them to access the list of people to be contacted. The list is automatically constructed within the database to pull together voters whose data places them in specific groups that the campaign wants to target, such as undecided young voters. Each volunteer’s first voter file pops up, which reveals someone’s phone number and relevant information about them such as their age and other members of their household. Shown next to their information, an accompanying script tailored to the list remains consistent throughout the session.

And so the calls begin. Scattered throughout the script are dropdown menus from which volunteers select options based on responses from the call. Each conversation—if everything goes well—usually ends with the classic ask: “Can we count on your support this election?”

With the widespread implementation of datadriven political campaign strategies, data collected from these canvassing efforts has become increasingly crucial. Yet with the advent of advanced technological tools and more ways to collect personal data, the broader implications of using these to influence the public should be questioned. +++ Public relations campaigns play a massive role in shaping our patterns of consumption, and with the rise of Big Data—which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “Extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions”—these techniques have grown exponentially in sophistication. No longer do advertisers have to appeal to the average consumer in order to sell; they’re now able to understand and target niches with an unprecedented level of granularity. Political campaigns have similarly evolved: Our hearts and minds have been treated as a marketplace, with campaigns competing to sell us platforms in exchange for our votes. Though this strategy has met varying success, it has become widely implemented by the Democratic and Republican establishments alike since it was piloted in Obama’s 2012 campaign.

The use of Big Data has caused a massive shift in the way campaigns are run. In the past, campaigns vied for political support through traditional media outlets, such as television and radio. Though political messaging was widespread, its reach was inherently limited by its medium, since messages could only be shared to an indiscriminate audience. In the same way businesses had to advertise their products to the average buyer, candidates’ best strategy was to appeal to the average, undecided voter in an attempt to swing their support.

This is no longer the case. Since the advent of datadriven campaigns, appeals to the masses have largely been replaced. Instead, the predominant strategy for candidates has become identifying their base and mobilizing them to vote. In the US, both parties make use of tools that allow them to do this. Democratic campaigns use NGP VAN, a software that provides “websites … organizing, fundraising, compliance, and digital tools” for progressive campaigns; Republicans have begun to use the services of a rival company, NationBuilder. These software-as-service companies are the leaders in campaign data management and 09

SCIENCE & TECH

CW: state violence, racism

Big Data and the pitfalls of targeted campaigning are used by campaigns across the United States and around the world.

The databases hosted on these services are, in their most basic form, contact lists of individuals to reach out to about the candidate’s platform. But in addition to knowing your address and party affiliation, campaigns are able to build a detailed profile that includes your interests and past interactions with not just the candidate themselves, but with the party with which they’re affiliated. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that political campaigns in the US also have access to “income, number of homes, kinds of vacations, number of children and education history” and can purchase consumer data.

Using this information, voter database software creates predictive scores determining behavior, support, and responsiveness. Behavior scores indicate the likelihood of a voter taking certain actions, such as donating, volunteering, and going to the polls.

Support scores reflect how much the individual would support the candidate. Responsiveness scores represent whether someone will react to outreach favorably, negatively, or whether they’ll respond at all. A combination of the three creates segmentations in the voter database for issue-specific email blasts to be sent to, or lists of people for volunteers to call.

Furthermore, with rapid technological advancement, the sophistication of machine learning models has accelerated over the past few years alone. As exemplified by the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, this has allowed political campaigns and consultancies to go even further. Rather than using only the information found through public voting records and data collected by people, campaigns can take advantage of advanced psychological models created using machine learning techniques that have only recently become possible through increased computing power.

Cambridge Analytica uses individuals’ data to score them on their “openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.” Profiles generated from these models broaden the ways in which campaigns can reach the electorate; for example, online advertisements can be targeted to individuals whose browsing history classifies them as likely supporters. +++

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for Illinois’ 7th congressional district expressed this frustration: “What’s one more way you can stack the deck against me? Deny me access to valuable information and data.” Clark ran as a Justice Democrat, part of a coalition inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid that hopes to push the Democratic party to the left. Many of these candidates were denied access to the party’s troves of data. Sanders himself was embroiled in a data-centered scandal in December 2015 when his campaign mistakenly received access to Hillary Clinton’s voter database; in response, the DNC shut his campaign out of NGP VAN entirely.

These candidates often choose to run under the Democratic label in the first place because they foresee difficulties in running without a mainstream party name attached to them. Yet when state party leadership—which largely supports the establishment— wields the power to choose who does and does not get data, it discourages those who don’t fit into the mold from throwing their hats into the ring at all.

There already exist massive financial barriers for candidates who are challenging party establishment; the added challenge that comes from lacking data, however, is that it’s nearly impossible to get even close to the same level of sophistication by starting from zero.

As data becomes currency for political power, incumbents are the richest, leaving challengers knocking on doors with no sense of who might be on the other side.

More insidiously, however, massive amounts of data on the electorate have enabled a phenomenon that parallels market segmentation. The splitting of messaging to cater to highly specific groups further commodifies public opinion as something to be bought and sold, rather than something that is formed organically. Today, mainstream campaigns with rich voter data opt to communicate with individuals whom they’ve algorithmically determined to support them, rather than appealing to broader groups. Campaigns are now putting greater attention on converting existing support into votes than on expanding their base, under the assumption that costs are better spent on the former.

Whether this has contributed to or is a result of political polarization is unclear, but this practice effectively limits public discourse by reinforcing already-entrenched beliefs among voters, rather than creating productive conversation on important issues.

Compounded with the rising ideological insularity of social circles and online spaces oft-criticized by political figures, data-driven outreach practices and advertisements have become an ironic blow to democratic principles. In an interview with Vox, Yale political science professor Eitan Hersh agreed that campaigns are “not looking to persuade people with ideas or arguments; they're just identifying the people most likely to vote for them and excluding everyone else.”

This is not to say that it’s inherently bad for candidates to know more about their constituents. The wealth of data owned by campaigns can reveal meaningful insights about voters’ priorities that genuinely lead to better representation of the electorate once a candidate is in office. And given the reality that data is driving the future of decision making—though this should certainly be interrogated, too—it would be foolish to suggest that campaigns stop using the data readily accessible to them. Yet we will never enact broader societal change if campaigns continue to target only those who are committed to them. After all, what would happen if nobody could change their mind?

“They leave because they want to break the curse that steals people attempting to cross the border unaccompanied their dreams the moment they are born.” since 2014. The youth in my country has not stopped migrating, despite the long and dangerous journey. Due This line begins and concludes a recent article in to the extreme poverty, the increasing violence, the Skylight written by Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, lack of basic needs that our government should provide Maya-K’iche’ journalist, activist, and Brown University to all citizens like education, health and housing, visiting professor from Guatemala. Professor Nimatuj migrating is the only option left for entire generations. asks, and answers, why do children leave my country? For a lot of young people, staying in Guatemala means Armed conflict, loss of loved ones, destruction of incorporating themselves into organized crime and resources, natural disasters, and poverty are some of gangs as the only means of survival. Guatemala is a the reasons that push children to leave Guatemala in failed state...Guatemala is a country with high levels of search of a better life. These children, she explains, corruption and those in power only see for the interest seek to break the cycle of poverty into which they were of a small economic and political elite. born. Following this piece, she wrote an open letter to President Donald Trump and the government of the The Indy: What do you think about the so-called United States of America, explaining the factors that “migrant caravan” and the related media coverage in push people out of their homes and their countries. the US? Dr. Nimatuj is an international spokeswoman for Indigenous communities in Central America and VN: For me, it is not a caravan; it is a humanitarian was the first Maya-K’iche’ woman to earn a doctorate crisis. Now, this is a humanitarian crisis from many in social anthropology. Ki’che’ translates to “many communities. Many Indigenous, many poor people, trees,” named for the highland mountain valley where that live in the middle of poverty, with no dreams, no the K’iche’ people have resided for over one thousand possibilities, no options. It’s unacceptable. Because years, predating the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in those countries are very rich countries, and they are 1534 and subsequent colonization. Dr. Nimatuj played beautiful countries. a central role in making racial discrimination illegal in Guatemala and is featured in 500 Years, a documentary The media in the US—they don’t care about Indigenous about Indigenous resistance movements, for her role people. The majority of people here don’t know where as an activist and expert witness in war crimes trials. Central America is. Now they have a lot of bias about Dr. Nimatuj writes a weekly newspaper column for people from Central America, a lot of stereotypes.

El Periódico de Guatemala and has served on the UN They don’t know the history, the responsibility of the Commission on the Status of Women, representing US, they don’t know what type of government is there.

Latin America and the Caribbean. This fall, she joined The coverage of the news is very poor. The poverty is the Watson Institute at Brown, where she teaches caused by the state, and the government is incredibly courses about Central American history and culture ignorant of reality. and continues her activism remotely.

Conservative discourse in mainstream media In Central America––Guatemala, Honduras, and El portrays the immigrant as a criminal, wrongly deceiving Salvador—those countries are controlled by very few, US citizens into believing that people who seek asylum a political and economic elite. In the case Guatemala, are “illegal” and somehow pose a threat. Dr. Nimatuj for example, eight families control the whole country. seeks to move these conversations and debates towards Twenty families control El Salvador. It is the same in a focus on asylum seekers and their humanity––and Honduras. It is impossible. They control the land. They their vulnerability. While political rhetoric focuses on control the businesses. They control the education. the consequences of immigration to the US, there is They control the schools. They control the church. an underlying and often unspoken question: What are They control the state. They control everything. This is the conditions that people are so desperate to escape? the problem.

The answers, it turns out, are deeply connected to US foreign policy in Central America over the past The Indy: How would you respond to the current decades. anti-immigrant discourse in the US? The Independent met with Dr. Nimatuj to discuss migration patterns to the United States from Central VN: If the United States wants to stop migration, the America, Indigenous resistance in Guatemala, and our country needs to reevaluate its foreign policy. The US collective responsibility to young people who are forced needs to reevaluate the way the money is spent so that to decide between violence at home and a dangerous current and future donations and aid are not lost to journey North. Dr. Nimatuj provides an inspiring, crit- corruption. That is why programs centered on reducing ical perspective on the people behind the incisive rhet- poverty cannot be imposed using a foreign or elite oric in American media today. vision, they need to be created alongside the communities. The way our country is run cannot be conditioned +++ by the policies or decisions of the United States.

The spread of campaign strategies that rely on such an intimate “understanding” of voters can actually harm democracy in two important ways.

First, the proliferation of data-driven campaign strategies creates additional resource disparities between candidates that can discourage potential contenders from running. Most notably, the Democratic National Committee has formally partnered with NGP VAN, which means that the party decides who can and cannot receive access to the company’s different platforms. The VoteBuilder system—which Wired Magazine called “the central nervous system of every Democratic campaign”—hosts the unified database to which all state parties have access and which holds all of the voter data the party has accumulated over nearly 10 years. However, in states such as Illinois and Missouri, state party policy dictates that candidates running against incumbents do not get to share the wealth of data that lives in that ecosystem. These candidates can get access to other NGP VAN tools to host data they collect over the course of their campaign, but are at a clear disadvantage without the more sophisticated datasets of their rivals.

ANGIE KIM B’20 is from Canada.

Such a policy clearly privileges those already in power. Anthony Clark, a Democratic primary candidate

this is a humanitarian crisis, and nobody wants to talk about it. The people say the caravan, the UN says the caravan—no, this is a humanitarian crisis. It is being used [politically] lightly—only as a fear, a terror. They are bad people, they are delinquent, they have a lot of illnesses. You know? And this is not true.

The Indy: What steps can we collectively take to improve conditions in Guatemala?

VN: We need the Indigenous population to be able to create their own self-sustaining development and not turn them into dependents of political favors or short term social program offers. To achieve this, the government and transnational companies need to stop encroaching on the last of the Indigenous territory to favor mining companies that only leave 1% of royalties in Guatemala. That is why there is so much poverty in Guatemala, because companies are arriving and pilfering the territory and natural resources, leaving behind social conflict. It is ridiculous that a country as rich as Guatemala needs to survive from donations from the international community and that despite this aid, poverty increased eight percent in the last decade.

This goes to show that the majority of the aid is not well implemented and only used to increase the riches of a few politicians.

The Indy: Do you have any comments on Trump's recent threat to cut aid to Honduras?

VN: Foreign aid is beneficial but not the way it is being used right now. Aid for the militarization of our countries or to fight the war of drugs has not yielded any positive effects for Central America. Instead it has led to more violence and corruption of the militaries, elites and politicians. In Guatemala, military vehicles donated by the United States are used to intimidate the population in the entire country and even to surround and threaten the U.S. embassy in the capital. We don’t need any more of that aid. If Trump cuts foreign aid, I highly doubt that the poorest and most needed communities and people would notice a difference.

Central America is currently surviving thanks to the remittances sent from immigrants living abroad. They are the ones who are really providing aid. +++ The Indy: How did you initially become involved in activism, and how does it connect to your work as a scholar and a journalist?

VN: I was born in a K’iche community that has always been politically active. My community has resisted since 1524 when the Spanish arrived at our territory.

During the following three centuries of the colonial era and through independence of Guatemala in 1821, my community managed to maintain a few political spaces and power. Yet it was not until 1972 that The College Hill Independent: You recently wrote The Indy: How could this story be told better? the Indigenous population of my city founded a civic an article about unaccompanied children leaving community, called Xel-Ju, and from there fought to Guatemala, and the trauma of state violence and VN: To read… to read about the history of interventions win the mayoral elections of my city, finally winning in massacres. What motivated you to write this piece? of the United States in these countries. This is the best 1996. This means that I am a product of a long line of way people can learn what happened, why people left struggle that my community began since the Spanish Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj: It was the profound their communities, their houses, their countries, their invasion. Being an activist cannot be separated from indignation and pain I felt seeing kids and young families, their sons. You know? This is crazy. For me, my academic work because it is my responsibility to

07

09 NOV 2018

Dear _______________

Love from ____________

NEWS

07 NOV 2018

PART I

M. & T. VISIT ATTLEBORO

A SERIES

M: Attleboro?

T: Attleboro apparently is the only state in the US where weed is 100% legal and has low taxes for it too, and also most of taxes go to public school funding** T: says E.! I didn’t know this T: we could go to Attleboro! it seems kind of interesting T: if its not we take another train T: I have all morning now that Im skipping Type T: we could make this trip be 5–10!

T: Do you have a camera also?

T: shall we take this one?

T: 802 [a 5:25am train] M: sounds good!!

M: i dont have a camera but have phone??

– Friday morning – T: ~Maria~ [sent at 5:29 am] – 7:13 am, M&T board the 808 train – ** upon later research: the above information is hugely exaggerated, though not completely false!

PART I

M. & T. VISIT ATTLEBORO

A SERIES

THE LIST FRIDAY

Aleppo Sweets POP-UP @Stock Culinary Goods! // 756 Hope Street // 3-6PM

Aleppo Sweets is a new Syrian pastry shop slated to open on Ives Street at some point in the near future. Until then, the refugee-owned small business will be hosting several pop-up sales throughout the city—this Friday, baker Youssef Akhtarin will be selling some killer baklava among the petite forks, mandolins, and pressure cookers at Stock Culinary Goods. Come support Youssef and learn more about his future plans!

SATURDAY

Fine Furnishings Show // 10AM-6PM // Waterfire Arts Center (475 Valley Street) // $10

Gawk at some beautiful chairs and tables inside of a warehouse. Included in the price of admission is entry into a door prize lottery! This LW hopes that the furniture moguls throwing this event literalize the idea of a door prize by gifting the winner a physical door.

WaterFire Salute to Veterans Brazier Dedications // 5-11PM // 100 Canal Walk

At the second List-endorsed, WaterFire-sponsored event of the day, attendees are encouraged to ‘honor a veteran by lighting a brazier.’ More like, honor a female veteran by lighting a brassiere!

SUNDAY

From Scratch PVD // 7-9PM // Black Box Theater, 95 Empire Street

FROM SCRATCH is an ongoing experiment in interactive black-box theater performance. All attendees are invited to take the stage, test out their nascent performance ‘ideas,’ and listen to audience input on how the plausible show could one day be improved. This is also the model that the Indy employs at its weekly crit session, when we review and give feedback to our own newspaper. Except the Indy doesn’t hold staff meetings inside of a large, black box. But we should!

MONDAY

Ernesto Zedillo—President of Mexico (1994-2000) // De Ciccio Auditorium, Solomon Center for Teaching (79 Waterman Street) // 5-6PM

Zedillo was Mexico’s president during some of the first years of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); now he’s Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and on the board at Citibank and BP. If you ever wanted to know what a technocrat is, look no further.

Appropriately, his talk, “Challenging the Challengers of Globalization,” buries the politics of its title under a pile of nonsense. Consider this, at best, a view into world finance from one of its architects.

TUESDAY

Learn to Solder with the Educato // AS220 (115 Empire Street) // 6-9PM

Don’t let the straightforward title of this workshop fool you: this is a tool for revolution. Specifically, against the Genius Bar. This will teach you how to solder, AKA “make simple repairs on electronics that were once thought broken for good.” Throw off the tyranny of the warranty and rise up!

WEDNESDAY

Forrest Gander with Cole Swenson and Patricio Ferrari // Riffraff Bookstore and Bar (60 Valley Street, Unit 107A) // 7-8PM

Forrest Gander, a poet with a keen eye for ecological and cultural history as well as his own emotional life, is a treasure. His new book, “Be With,” is a testament to his late wife C.D. Wright—herself a master in her own right—as well as his mother, on top of reflections on the US-Mexico border and St. John of the Cross. This will surely be a beautiful reading.

Tolerably Black: Artist-Led Tour and Panel Discussion // Granoff Center for the Arts (154 Angell Street) // 4:30-7PM

Artist Aretha Busby created this exhibition as both a reflection on the experiences of her great-greatgreat-great grandmother and on how a history of enslavement suffuses contemporary life. It sounds like the panel following her tour of the show—coordinated by representatives from the Center for Reconciliation and The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown—will be structured completely non-hierarchically, which may be a powerful opportunity to hear from more community perspectives than you usually might at other artist talks.

THURSDAY

The Art of Race—Decorative Arts // RISD Museum (20 North Main Street) // 6-7:30PM

The influence of decorative arts rarely get their due in a wider canon of art history, and when they do, it’s often relegated to white fake socialists in the Arts and Crafts movement. This will be rare look into the construction of RISD’s archive—and, perhaps, into its absences—focused on the racial history of decorative arts (costumes and textiles) in the museum’s collection.