The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 7

03 rethinking childcare policy in the US

09 pvd’s ongoing lead crisis

13 our guts, ourselves

Volume 38 • Issue 07

March 22, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R n* A B row

D IS

ly Week

The Indy Contents

From The Editors

Cover Nighttime Clay Samuel Berenfield

There are rotting bunches of kale in our fridges; our floors are still sticky with the residue of melted snow trekked in by our Doc Martens three weeks ago.

Yesterday, my mortality flashed before me like an ambient specter when I sprained my ankle while running across Blackstone Boulevard, but really it’s fine.

The ambient specter, I swear, had the same surgically enhanced smile as John Travolta.

News 02 Week in Archaic Institutions Raina Wellman, Giacomo Sartorelli

Are you even reading this? Yes, thank you. The days are finally getting longer and our layers lighter, but to be honest, the prospect of Providence humidity makes me anxious. Cashmere does not have good moisture-wicking properties.

We’re dreaming of experiencing powdery sand beaches, views from the top floor of a skyscraper that is not the SciLi. Holding out for a world outside our 1AM Instagram explore page. Break is almost here! How many times a day is it acceptable to go to Shiru? Can the Indy crowdsource that?

03 Crisis of Care David Golden Metro 05 A Tale of Three Cities Rachel Rood-Ojalvo 09 There’s Still Something in the Water Peder Schaefer, Deborah Marini, & Ricardo Gomez

- JAM

Ephemera 07 Mastering the Art of The Joy of Cooking The Indy Staff

Mission Statement

Science & Tech 08 Dogs Affixed Emma Kofman

Features 11 Exit Interview with My Grandmother Lily Meyersohn

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.

Literary 13 Skymall Club Cam Collins

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 16 Two Poems Athena Zeros

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.

13 Intestines, and How We Were Never Born Seamus Flynn

Arts 17 The Individual Uniform Bilal Memon

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson

22 MARCH 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 07

Eve Zelickson

Caroline Sprague

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Straus Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung

Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador

Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Jeff Katz

Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu

Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

Business Maria Gonzalez

MVP Seamus Flynn

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop

Katrina Northrop Chris Packs Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

*** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN ARCHAIC INSTITUTIONS

BY Giacomo Sartorelli, Raina Wellman ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Amos Jackson

Awake, Arise, Or Be Forever Fall’n Wednesday’s vernal equinox heralded the arrival of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but most of the American public had already shifted their schedules back an hour on March 10 to accommodate the new season. First proposed in 1895 by New Zealandic entomologist George Hudson, modern Daylight Saving Time (DST) was designed to extend the sunlit leisure time of workers in the summer months. An employee of the Wellington Post Office, Hudson lamented the arrival of dusk so close to the end of his work shift during the most productive season for insect collecting.

He reasoned that if civil time were to be shifted backwards by two hours each spring, people would be able to spend more of the longer summer day indulging their ‘out-of-door’ hobbies.

Though conceived in paradise, a nationwide implementation of DST was born in the hell of war.

On April 30, 1916, the German Empire and AustriaHungary became the first states to adopt DST as a means of conserving their nations’ coal supplies for the war effort. In the United States, DST was first implemented at the tail-end of WWI, and quickly repealed thereafter. It was not until 1942 that DST became the standard again when President Roosevelt mandated a year-round “War Time” to conserve fuel. Repealed again in 1945, there were no federal regulations for DST until 1967 when the transportation industry lobbied the government to standardize the nation. The next major expansion of DST occurred during the 1973 oil embargo when Congress again mandated a yearround DST for two years. Following this trial period, the Department of Transportation conducted a study on the effects of DST on energy consumption. The findings were inconclusive, with the most optimistic interpretation of the data suggesting very slight reductions in crime and energy usage nationwide. Nonetheless, Congress amended the 1967 Uniform Time Act in 1986 by extending the duration of summer DST by several weeks.

Summer DST remained unchanged until 2005, when a second major energy crisis prompted the Bush administration to pass the Energy Policy Act, extending DST by another four weeks (while also granting massive tax breaks to the coal, nuclear energy, and petroleum industries). The act spawned an unorthodox coalition of supporters and opponents.

For example, then Senators McCain and Obama found themselves on opposite sides of their respective party lines and, for reasons inscrutable to the laity, both the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism lobbied against the Energy Policy Act. Know ye not that ye are not your own? Perhaps the same is true of our time. The spiritual and environmental benefits of DST may be dubious, but it is clear that DST boosts consumer spending by encouraging people to shop after work. Sporting goods manufacturers, confectioners, and commercial retailers all stand to lose or gain hundreds of millions in annual revenue depending on when summer DST is implemented. However, a collective tax is levied against the health of the average American in exchange for this economic stimulus: heart attacks increase by 24 percent the morning after DST, and workplace accidents and injuries increase for more than a week across nearly all industries.

If there are any conclusions to be drawn from the history of modern DST, it is that competing industries and individuals each have their own uniquely foolish justifications for starting and ending the day sooner or later. Dairy farmers argue that the health and productivity of their cows are imperiled by the abrupt change in schedule (but neglect to ask if it disturbs their employees’ health) and suburban parents voice

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

concern over their children walking to school in the dark (while ignoring the dismal sleep schedule of the average American child). But on the first day of spring, basking in the perfection of a balanced night and day, this Independent editor was left wondering if we could circumvent the entire debate by reviving the sundial to calibrate a theoretically balanced 24 hour day. Every day could be an equinox.

With her very own hashtag (#TheQueenTweets), she shared: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.” The account followed up her post by sharing: “The last tweet -GS was sent personally by The Queen from her official Twitter account @BritishMonarchy The Real Internet Queen #TheQueenTweets.”

Instagram sucks people in, feeds the constant I’ll admit it: my real and only interest with the Queen cycle of celebrity coverage, and connect us with people of England is her monochromatic outfits. Besides the as distant and obscure (at least to us commoners) as shades of blue and pink she often wears, I don’t think the Queen of England. In the long run, I predict that about her or the royal family very often, if ever. To Elizabeth R. is looking to nab Olivia Jade’s recently lost survive such apathy, the royal institution must retain spon-con deals with Sephora, TRESemme, and Estee its popularity. And these days popularity is upheld Lauder. By engaging the public, growing her following, either by paying taxes and getting attention on social and gaining advertising support, the Queen will soon media. On March 7, Queen Elizabeth II took off one of be posting staged self portraits in various get-ups celeher long, black gloves to make her first Instagram post brating significant events of each year she has been from the official @theroyalfamily account, writing the Queen of England. I look forward to her dressed about her visit to the Science Museum of London. as Twiggy, as a random Beatles fan, and as Banksy's “Today, as I visit the Science Museum I was inter- iconic girl with red balloon. ested to discover a letter from the Royal Archives, written in 1843 to my great-great-grandfather Prince -RW Albert. Charles Babbage, credited as the world’s first computer pioneer, designed the ‘Difference Engine,’ of which Prince Albert had the opportunity to see a prototype in July 1843,” the post begins,

BY Kevin Dong going on to talk about children’s coding initiatives and the museum’s history of championing innovation. The Queen signs off as Elizabeth R. The British royal family’s Instagram has 2,439 posts, consisting mostly of photo-ops of people shaking hands, but Queen Elizabeth II has a posting style that is as unique as her wardrobe. So far, her two Instagram posts are heartfelt and offer a break from the people-focused imagery more commonly found on the account.

Her posts are more reflective, less pomp and circumstance, and she has yet to post a selfie. Looking at them, it’s fun to conjure the image of the Queen caught up in an infinite scroll of Instagram content, her thumb stiffening and her body slouched.

But in reality, Queen Elizabeth II posts her Instagrams in front of an adoring audience. Following her first ever post, @theroyalfamily shared a video where you can watch the exact moment she hits the share button. The phone is delicately propped on a podium and the audience offers loud claps of encouragement.

The Queen is not entirely new to social media. She posted her first tweet from the account @BritishMonarchy back in 2014 after visiting an exhibition at London’s Science Museum.

ORGANIC COPY

NEWS

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CRISIS Ten years ago, the Wall Street Journal interviewed daycare operators around the country to compile a list of tips and tricks for getting your child a coveted spot in their programs. They listed eight steps for success, but the most important is registering for multiple waitlists at least a year, if not two, before you need care. You read that correctly: you must sign up for daycare before your child is conceived. For each of those waitlists, parents pay non-refundable fees that can exceed $200 and don’t even guarantee a spot. Why is finding care so costly and difficult?

It’s because high-quality child care centers are few and far between. The center-left think tank Center for American Progress estimates more than half of American children live in areas with fewer daycare spots than children. This scarcity means parents lucky enough to land a spot often pay over $10,000 a year.

Low-income parents are locked out and must forgo the jobs they need to support their families or send their children, sometimes only weeks or months old, to low-quality and often unlicensed care providers. The latter choice can end in tragedy: children die each year at cheap, nearly unregulated, and sometimes illegal home-based child care centers. In the past month, children died in both Jacksonville and Oklahoma City from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome brought on by improper sleep techniques. Without proper training, vetting, or support, home care operators take on the immensely difficult and stressful work of care for long hours and low wages. America’s byzantine system of care and support tears parents away from their child’s first few months and makes good, long-term care nearly impossible to find.

Recently think tanks and politicians have rolled out responses to the American crisis of care. The differences between plans illuminate tensions between work and family as well as varied conceptions of gender equity and feminism. Most of these plans come in the form of data-driven reports or affectless legalese. Two of them, however, paint a different picture. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is promoting herself as much as her policy, embeds her pitch in personal history.

And over at the People’s Policy Project, the Family Fun Pack’s simple and well-designed website makes the argument that family policy is a means to reduce suffering and increase fun and fulfillment.

How We Got Here

Congress has neglected care for decades, leaving parents to navigate a confusing patchwork of benefits untouched since the 1990s. The last push for comprehensive reform was in the ’70s; looking at why it failed can help us understand why nothing has succeeded since.

In 1971, President Nixon vetoed universal daycare.

Despite a wide array of supporters and an easy majority in Congress, Nixon, under the coaching of right-wing paleocon Pat Buchanan, cast the program as an immoral, communist plot to remove “the family… [from] it’s rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.” The veto was part of efforts by a newly ascendant Right that mixed racism, religion, and big business in service of dismantling the New Deal. In blocking daycare, right-wing politicians sought to reinforce a patriarchal economy that allowed white men the benefit of their wives’ unwaged labor at home and the cheap labor women of color as domestic and service workers outside of it.

The legacy of Nixon’s decision, and the movement

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that supported it, culminated in Bill Clinton’s infamous promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite a brief digression that created a system of unpaid leave for about 60 percent of Americans, Clinton oversaw a decimation of the programs that support parents.

Clinton signed major welfare reform in 1996 that claimed to restore “dignity” to work by cutting cash supports and encouraging employment. Its effect was to punish children. Different paths were available: across the Atlantic, Tony Blair’s administration in the UK cut child poverty in half with a universal child allowance. In America rates held steady at 20 percent through the Great Recession. A few tweaks in the tax code since then have dropped the rate to 12 percent, still double countries like the UK and Sweden.

That’s where we stand today: a paltry system of leave, impossibly expensive daycare, and little in the way of cash-support for poor and single-parent families.

Warren’s Plan

Last month, Elizabeth Warren called for making universal childcare a right. Her plan envisions a nationwide system of affordable childcare centers paid for with federal funds and enforced to high federal standards. Using the money from her ultra-millionaires tax, Warren’s plan ensures free care for families with incomes up to 200 percent of the poverty line (around $51,000 for a family of 4) and a cap at 7 percent of income for richer families. Care-workers, often in precarious positions, will see massive salary increases—a move proponents have long deemed necessary to raise care quality. Warren’s plan acknowledges the dual role women play as mothers and workers by focusing on the way policy affects both parents who need care and those who will provide it. If her plan becomes law, all Americans will, for the first time, have genuine and easy access to good child care. It will increase children’s quality of care, prevent tragic deaths, and improve the lives of millions, especially women.

The details of Warren’s plan evince her long history as an advocate for women. In the ’90s, as a Harvard Law School professor, Warren argued in Congress against Wall Street-backed bankruptcy reform. The fight showed the Senator’s keen eye in understanding how even seemingly esoteric laws affect women. In the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Warren attacked Democrats who supported the bill because bankruptcy reform “will fall hardest on women, particularly on women trying to rear children on their own… [it] will make it more difficult for millions of women to keep their homes, feed their children, and deal with bill collectors.” Because women are poorer, more likely to rely on alimony, and more likely to be a single-parents than men, bankruptcy laws burden them more. Warren looks at issues—like affordable housing or monopolistic businesses run amok—and works to understand why they occur and in particular how women are affected. It is an extremely powerful approach and it pays dividends in other ways when she, for example, approaches the issue of housing from how it affects people of color. She arrives at a political philosophy not from abstract principles, but from understanding, and trying to fix, the pain points of her own life and the lives of her constituents.

This political ideology helps explain why Warren, alone among 2020 candidates so far, made the critical issue of a childcare a central part of her candidacy. She

begins her plan by describing how stressful it was for her to return to work after giving birth, the challenges of finding good daycare, and her eventual breakdown over the phone to her Aunt Bee back home. Aunt Bee moved in for 15 years to help raise the kids, but, as Warren always says, not everyone has an aunt to call.

After telling a story about her own mother’s struggle with single motherhood and work, Warren told an audience in Jackson, MS, “For a long time I used to think that was just a story about my mother,” but “years later I came to understand that it's the story of millions of Americans.” This rhetorical move that translates women’s lived experienced into policy runs through Warren’s candidacy.

The reason Warren, and millions of women, were forced to turn to aunts and friends for care may be because our economic and political systems are “rigged,” as the candidate says. But her response is to unrig those markets, not dismantle them. When Warren calls herself a “capitalist to my bones,” as she did last summer, this is, perhaps, what she saying. Over time her prescriptions to fix capitalism have grown bolder, from proposing new bank regulations in the ’90s to calls for breaking up the banks and jailing their CEOs after the 2008 crash. But she still believes that, with enough modification, capitalism can work for all.

It is both her strength and weakness: The capitalist to her bones understands why housing is so expensive.

From there she writes a plan that attacks the issue head-on, from the legacies of legalized segregation to the nitty-gritty of parking reform. Yet, she neglects using public housing to ensure every American has a home. Warren is a consumer advocate at heart and her policy works that way by helping people buy the necessities of life in a market that actually works.

Warren’s daycare plan reflects and is circumscribed by this approach. Right now, low-income parents are stuck in a double-bind: If they cannot afford care they must stay home and care for their child, further reducing family income. Women—and it is mainly women—often forgo paid labor for the five years after birth until their children can attend public school, America’s de-facto childcare system. The lost promotions and wages from this period constitute the “maternity tax.” Warren’s plan eases this burden by giving women a cheap or free option for care and allowing them to return to the workforce sooner. Here, Warren enters into the longstanding debate on the Left about the meaning of equality. Her plan encourages women to work outside their homes in part by making home care less financially viable. But what does equality look like? For some it is women’s unfettered access to the formal workforce. But for others it is when women are able to choose if they wish to be compensated for their labor inside or outside of their homes.

The issue scrambles ideological lines. Radical leftist welfare activists in the’70s pushed the “Wages for Housework” campaign, asserting that the work of caring for children at home should be compensated like any other form of labor. The movement for home care allowances has also found support on the right.

Conservative think tanks and senators push childcare allowances to reinforce traditional family structures.

Warren’s exclusion of care wages aligns with with a popular liberal view that equality means more women in the formal labor market. Interestingly, Warren took the opposite approach in her 2003 book, The Double Income Trap, arguing that stay at home mothers played a critical role and should be supported alongside

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BY David Golden ILLUSTRATION Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN Cecile Kim

Politicians and think-tanks have bold new plans to make raising kids cheaper, easier… and fun?

expanded daycare. Warren’s change on this issue, and her focus on women as workers, perhaps suggests her inability to articulate a vision of family policy that rests on values outside of the market.

labor force participation: making women stop caring for their own children to care for others’ children does not achieve gender equality­— especially in our racialized economy where so much of that burden will fall on women of color. And that links to another point, improving jobs in the caring sectors, predominantly filled by women, is key to gender equity. Warren’s plan to boost childcare workers salaries to that of public school teachers will lift millions of women out of poverty and provide a living wage to those doing the critical care-work out of the home.

The FFP’s comprehensive plan includes baby boxes (a temporary bed for babies that encourages safe sleeping), free school lunches for all, Medicare for Kids (0-26), and a universal child allowance of $300 a month. A child allowance would lift millions from poverty. It is so effective because today a family is often poor only because they are supporting their children.

Additionally, in covering the rest of childcare expenses, it accomplishes one of the FFP’s main goals: truly decoupling decisions about having children from the market. While universal benefits always redistribute between low-incomes and high-incomes, the FFP goes a bit further. For example, it imagines two families with incomes of $80,000. One family has two kids and the other none. Having kids in our current system is effectively a tax on salary, to the tune of $500,000 per child by the time they graduate from college. Under Warren’s plan, and ignoring all other costs beside daycare for a moment, our fictional family with two kids should expect to pay a 7 percent cost (i.e. tax) on daycare. It is only when equalizing across income levels and family size that decisions about whether to have kids, and crucially how many to have, are truly about what families want and not their finances.

the ability to have the families they want and inflicts financial ruin” on those who do so without adequate support—are few and far between in the usually dry world of think-tanks. The same goes for arguments for centering children’s quality of life with statements like “capitalist economies only provide income to those who work and those who own,” but children do neither. For this reason, we need to view having children as a social good. This difference of vision perhaps explains why Warren tackles daycare alone, but the FFP attempts to cover all of children’s needs.

One way to get at the meaningful differences between Warren’s plan and this one lies in the name: the Family Fun Pack wants parenting to be fun. When was the last time you heard a politician claim that the government should not just make your life materially better (if they will even concede that) but that it should facilitate the creation of meaningful family life?

Warren’s vision, in her child care plan and her other policy plans, is admirable and would help millions of Americans if implemented. But her approach, which turns her expertise on the structural problem in our markets, can be limiting because so much of life’s value exists outside the market. I asked Bruenig if he thought it was important for politicians to develop a more comprehensive theory of how government helps people. He told me politicians must begin telling stories about welfare that move beyond helping the unfortunate. While help for those in need is part of the story, it’s an incomplete picture: retirees receive more benefits than any other group, and kids receive a massive benefit in the form of free education. Bruenig thinks that the argument for social democratic welfare becomes more convincing when it centers on fixing the issues of distribution that affect everyone’s lives, not just the poor. In that light, Warren talking about how welfare would have helped her seems a good step.

In general, American lives will improve if politicians think of the benefits of policies in terms of allowing more time with family and friends and in replacing work with leisure.

A Socialist Proposal The People’s Policy Project, a socialist think-tank, approaches care from a different perspective. Their program centers improving children’s quality of life and making parenting enjoyable. Their cheekily named Family Fun Pack (FFP) calls for a “comprehensive set of universal family welfare benefits with the goal of making parenting easy and affordable for everyone.”

The tone and name illustrate the views of Matt Bruenig, the FFP’s author. He believes the welfare state is not a wonky abstraction, but a central tool for improving Americans’ lives. Put simply, the Family Fun Pack asks how much better parenting could be if financial and logistical stresses were alleviated by good policy.

In a conversation over email, Bruenig told the College Hill Independent that “the goal of social programs should be to make people’s lives better. One way to do that is by providing them resources. But another way they can do that is by eliminating hassle and complication, which chews up people’s time and stresses them out.” The plan’s design reflects this. Instead of shopping around and researching the federally subsidized programs in your area, as Warren imagines, the Family Fun Pack expands an institution all Americans are familiar with: public schools.

Free child-care centers will care for children aged six months to three years while three to five year olds can attend universal Pre-K. The federal government will fully fund both programs, ensuring equality across the country, but local school districts will administer them.

By making the programs free and universal, the Family Fun Pack simplifies decisions, creates a stronger polit- Why Program Design and Philosophy Matter ical base of support, and cuts down costs.

The Family Fun Pack’s comprehensive design, The Family Fun Pack imagines a world where covering almost all of the expenses of childhood, stems women are free to make their own choices about work from an equally comprehensive philosophy about and family. By offering universal paid leave of 36 supporting families. The opening lines of the FFP take weeks, the FFP allows parents to decide how to cover a moral stnce not usually seen in think tank reports. the gap between birth and care at childcare centers. "[The] dearth of family benefits," the report says, DAVID GOLDEN B’19 hopes parenting actually is fun This benefit (among others in the plan) is framed "leads to two cruel outcomes: it denies many people as an entitlement for children so that even parents without work history will receive the same benefits as a minimum-wage earner. Leave is split into 18-week chunks if two parents are present. Parents are free to decide if and how long they want to spend at home with their newborn. Parents can elect to transfer up to 14 weeks of leave to their partners. This generally leads women to take more leave than men, reducing their labor participation and activating the “maternity tax” discussed above. Bruenig agrees this is a problem, but argues against heavy handed approaches because it will impoverish children. The way that American gender norms play out in the workplace ensures that some families will need men to return to work to get by—there’s no reason to punish families by slashing a mother’s leave in half. He argues the only moral option is the hard and often nebulous work of changing norms, a process that has taken the form of educational campaigns in other countries.

The FFP’s inclusion of wages for home care also reflects its choice-centric model. If parents want to stay home they will receive wages for the first three years of their children’s lives. In Bruenig’s framing, forcing women to return to the labor force after the paid-leave period ends (especially those with low-paying jobs), when they wish to stay home and care for their children does not accomplish feminist goals. Bruenig also highlighted a paradox of feminist campaigns for women’s

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A TALE OF THREE CITIES

BY Rachel Rood-Ojalvo ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Bethany Hung

Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion in Seattle, New Orleans, and Pawtucket Jails and prisons have become the United States’ largest housing complex and healthcare system for people with mental health and substance abuse issues. As former Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox told the College Hill Independent, “it’s not working.”

Cox, now director of policing strategies for the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, is building new solutions. LEAD is a pre-arrest program that interrupts the revolving-door cycle of incarceration (about half of people released from jail or prison will return within three years, according to the Pew Center on the States) by helping people access stable housing and behavioral health services. When a LEAD-trained police officer arrests someone on an eligible charge, the officer can offer the individual enrollment in the program instead of putting them in jail. If the person opts in, they will be matched with a case manager and referred to services, such as mental health and substance abuse treatment, avoiding the criminal legal system altogether.

Cox summarized LEAD neatly: “Police have to stop being everybody’s answer to public health issues.

Law enforcement can’t solve homelessness.”

Now, local advocates want to bring LEAD to Rhode Island. Diego Arene-Morley, the community engagement coordinator at Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts (RICARES), is working to bring the program to Pawtucket, as a response to the opioid crisis. (Central Falls, Providence, and Pawtucket have higher overdose rates than the rest of the state.)

When I met with Arene-Morley, he wore a bright yellow long-sleeve t-shirt, high-top red Converse sneakers, and translucent red-framed glasses. His informality mirrored the room we sat in on the third floor of the Mathewson Street United Methodist Church in downtown Providence, open with high ceilings, tall windows, and various pamphlets about behavioral health services stuffed among books and binders.

Displayed on the mantel was Arene-Morley’s peer recovery specialist certificate, announcing that he uses his lived experience recovering from substance abuse and mental health issues, plus formal skills learned in training, to provide peers with recovery services.

He believes LEAD in Pawtucket will demand muchneeded public health responses—rather than stigmatization and criminalization—for folks with substance abuse and mental health issues. As other cities across the country have shown, LEAD can be a catalyst for changing our punitive culture, for moving away from arrest as a first response, and for providing people with the resources they need.

Several years earlier, civil right advocates at the Racial Disparity Project had threatened to sue the Seattle Police Department for discriminating against people of color. Frustrated, the department replied that their only option for responding to illegal drug users was incarceration. So, in an unprecedented collaboration between police, prosecutors, civil rights advocates, public defenders, political leaders, and service providers, people from across Seattle worked together to build another option: a community-based diversion program that places people in trauma-informed care systems—LEAD. For many activists, police are the symbol of a racist and violent system, which makes their involvement in police reform efforts controversial. For LEAD advocates, however, police are a starting point in the process of moving public health issues away from the criminal legal system.

LEAD is premised on the philosophies of “housing first” and “harm reduction.” Housing first acknowledges that people need a stable place to live before they can address less critical (yet still important) issues in their lives, such as getting a job or overcoming substance abuse. Harm reduction means focusing on individual and community wellness, instead of demanding sobriety from drug users. Participants are encouraged, but not rushed or required, to work toward treatment. Both of these philosophies are unusual in a system that forces people to earn basic resources through compliance (i.e. sobriety), rather than understanding social services as human rights.

Participants enter Seattle’s LEAD program through one of two avenues: upon arrest or by “social contact referral.” The first option means when police officers arrest an individual on a LEAD-eligible charge (in Seattle, low-level offenses such as drug possession and sales, or sex work), the officers may decide to offer the individual enrollment in the LEAD program. Cox admitted to the Indy that it often takes stakeholders, Seattle especially law enforcement, time to embrace LEAD— understanding mental health and substance abuse LEAD was launched in Seattle in 2011 to address racial issues as public health problems rather than crimes, disparities in drug policing, reduce recidivism rates, and thus referring participants to case management and respond to the opioid epidemic. instead of relying on arrests.

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Social contact referrals can catch people before they enter the web of the criminal legal system. This option allows other stakeholders—public defenders, prosecutors, or case managers, for example—to suggest people be offered LEAD services.

Both methods completely divert people away from the legal system and toward the resources that address unmet needs for services that address substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, and poverty.

The program also prevents future legal involvement. In 2015, a series of independent evaluations conducted by researchers at the University of Washington found LEAD reduced recidivism. LEAD participants were 58 percent less likely to be re-arrested after enrollment in the program, compared to a control group that went through system-as-usual legal processing. The findings also indicated improvements for LEAD participants across housing and employment outcomes.

LEAD functions as both a public safety and public health program. It improves the well-being of people struggling at the intersection of poverty, mental health, and substance abuse issues—which over half the national incarcerated population does, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. As of September 2018, LEAD in Seattle had reached 525 people.

After LEAD’s success in Seattle, other cities followed suit. Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Albany, New York, were the next jurisdictions to launch certified programs. So many municipalities called Seattle asking for advice that the LEAD founders established a national organization to assist in implementing the program across the country. The LEAD National Support Bureau’s website now features a map of programs dotting the entire country, including New Orleans under the “operating” column and, closer to home, Pawtucket under “exploring.”

New Orleans In 2005, Hurricane Katrina disproportionately devastated New Orleans’ poor communities of color, plowing straight through the city’s social support systems.

The storm laid bare deeper failures of these systems,

22 MARCH 2019

rooted in centuries of inequality and vulnerability, and left the jail overpopulated, the healthcare system overloaded and underfunded, and public housing all but demolished. Katrina was not the first time the city, or the country, abandoned these communities.

For a lot of activists, myself included, this tragedy clarified that criminal justice reform needs to embrace holistic solutions to mass incarceration. The importance of access to resources like housing and healthcare inspired my urban studies thesis on LEAD in New Orleans.

In 2013, New Orleans’ Health Department launched the Community Alternatives Program (CAP), a pre-trial diversion program for low-level, nonviolent charges to help defendants in Municipal Court with mental illness receive treatment and support. Officials at the health department realized, however, that CAP only reached individuals already caught up in the cycle of incarceration. They suggested implementing pre-arrest diversion, and in a collaboration with potential stakeholders—the police department, the mayor’s criminal justice council, and the Vera Institute—spent the next two and a half years developing New Orleans’ LEAD program.

LEAD’s expansive scope requires a level of coordination rarely seen in reform programs. Police, prosecutors, government officials, and social service providers have to be willing to come to the table together in order to address structural inequities. In New Orleans, these stakeholders identified the 8th District as the initial LEAD site, since the program was deemed too resource-intensive to start citywide. The 8th District (the French Quarter and Central Business District) had the highest concentration of LEAD-eligible offenses and a rate of arrest per resident at least twice as high as any other district.

It also helped that 8th District Police Commander Nicholas Gernon believes that jail is not the answer to addiction and understands that relapse is a part of recovery. Gernon is committed to LEAD for the longterm: “It’s an investment in people,” he told me. (I interviewed Gernon while researching my thesis.)

Having a progressive officer in charge of the district is significant. Evaluations of Seattle’s LEAD program advise that one of the most difficult elements of building the program’s coalition is line officer buy-in, which Gernon now oversees.

Another obstacle is prosecutor buy-in. Seattle’s success came partly because the district attorney there was enthusiastic about LEAD and involved in its implementation. But in New Orleans, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro is notoriously pro-incarceration and has refused several offers to collaborate officially on LEAD. As recently as last month, Cannizzaro called over-incarceration a “myth” and incarceration-reduction methods a threat to public safety “espoused by sheltered academics and naive politicians,” according to the New Orleans Advocate. Since DA’s offices deal with felony cases in New Orleans, LEAD’s only eligible drug-related offense is the misdemeanor of simple possession of marijuana not with intent to distribute. (New Orleans’ District Attorney elections are upcoming in November 2019, so the city will have an opportunity to choose a candidate committed to decarceration programs.)

The LEAD pilot program launched in November 2017, and Gernon has guaranteed funding for a two-year trial period to prove success. As of March 12, 2019, New Orleans’ pilot program had 23 participants, the majority of whom have been housed and entered into behavioral health treatment. While this number may seem small, as a first step, it constitutes a huge victory. Twenty-three people are accessing the resources they need instead of being funneled into incarceration. One “frequent flyer” who used to get arrested, on average, once every three days is now only arrested once or twice a month, and he has moved into subsidized housing. Gernon’s goal is to have 60 program participants by the end of 2019.

Then, the two-year pilot program will end, and LEAD stakeholders will ask the city council to renew funding and expand the program to other districts.

Gernon told me that the city council is supportive, and that the police department has undergone a post-Katrina culture shift, acknowledging the importance of alternative-to-incarceration opportunities. Given this support, it seems likely LEAD will be renewed in the 8th District and spread to adjacent districts too.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Pawtucket The opioid crisis hit New England hard. In 2017, Rhode Island recorded 1,673 drug overdoses, 323 of which were fatal—nearly one overdose death every day of the year. According to the Rhode Island Department of Health, overdose deaths increased by almost 90 percent between 2011 and 2017. Deaths related to fentanyl, a highly potent opioid, have increased 15-fold in the last ten years.

All thirty-nine cities and towns in Rhode Island have local nonprofit substance abuse prevention coalitions, which are members of broader regional organizations. RICARES is part of the Pawtucket Prevention Coalition, directed by Diane Dufresne, and is spearheading efforts to create a LEAD program in the city.

Arene-Morley’s plan involves a three-month pilot of LEAD, with a twist: instead of professional case management, Pawtucket would use peer recovery specialists, like himself.

The national LEAD organization approved this proposal, and Arene-Morley used a community overdose grant to bring Cox, the former Albany Police Chief and current LEAD national director of policing strategies, to Pawtucket for a presentation on LEAD’s strategies. In September 2018, Cox presented to stakeholders, including representatives from the Pawtucket Police Department, Mayor’s Office, and Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General.

Cox said his goal for the visit was to explain the core principles of LEAD as well as its origins. In his presentation, he explained that LEAD was not created solely to tackle the opioid epidemic; it was built to address racial disparities in the criminal legal system that disproportionately harm communities of color.

Cox facilitates open discussions with front-line officers about why they’re implementing the LEAD strategy: the system of mass incarceration has failed individuals who commit crimes, has failed the general public which is promised safety, and has failed police officers who strive to provide that safety. LEAD is a public safety tool, he says. “Arrest plus prosecution plus incarceration does not always equal public safety.”

LEAD-eligible people don’t need to be put in jail, Cox argues. Instead, these cases demand addressing the root causes of substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, and homelessness.

Even though the system isn’t working, many officials have a hard time changing their ways. LEAD’s strategy can be counter-intuitive to people who have been trained to rely on arrests and incarceration. In Pawtucket, stakeholders have reached a political stalemate. The mayor’s office and police department are concerned with legal issues surrounding not arresting people who commit certain crimes, said Arene-Morley.

Both the mayor’s office and the police department did not respond to request for comment. Kristy dosReis, a spokesperson for the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office wrote in an email that “One of AG Neronha’s priorities at the start of his administration has been to explore the office’s ability to elevate and expand access to diversion in Rhode Island.” Asked specifically about obstacles to LEAD’s implementation in Pawtucket, she wrote, “We have not been contacted

by Pawtucket officials with concerns.”

In Seattle, the legislature granted the Police Department discretionary authority to decide not to arrest someone for a LEAD-eligible crime and to instead enroll them in the program. In Pawtucket, Arene-Morley says political entities are concerned the proposed program falls outside the legal parameters of law enforcement. However, according to LEAD’s National Support Bureau, 40 other municipalities across the country are successfully implementing it.

Rhode Island, where state and local politics are closely intertwined, is turning instead to the state-police-run Heroin-Opioid Prevention Effort (HOPE). The HOPE initiative focuses on patients discharged from the hospital after suffering an overdose, and incarcerated people, soon to be released, who receive substance abuse treatment in prison. HOPE and LEAD rely on fundamentally different models: the former is retroactive because it waits for people to overdose, whereas the latter is proactive in addressing root causes of crime.

Rhode Island’s recidivism rate, measured three years after release, hovers around 50 percent. LEAD might be able to help, given that the program is proven

to reduce recidivism, break the cycle of incarceration, and provide long-term treatment for substance abuse. +++ Arene-Morley told the Indy that LEAD’s proposed peer-to-peer element in Pawtucket would ensure participants’ recovery contact is outside law enforcement. The community overdose grant would fund peer recovery specialist involvement in LEAD. Arene-Morley says that LEAD is supposed to make police officers’ lives easier by dealing with public health issues that shouldn’t be the responsibility of law enforcement in the first place.

As it stands, Arene-Morley is using the LEAD philosophy to move forward with a pilot effort, which will not be officially LEAD-designated because all of the stakeholders have not signed on. He still plans to conduct targeted peer outreach on behalf of RICARES, similar to LEAD’s social contact referral method.

For him, the next steps include identifying hotspots for drug crime, shoplifting, and sex work.

There is a direct correlation between the density of drug crimes and the density of overdoses, so AreneMorley hopes to find those geographic locations to connect with people interested in using more safely and exploring wellness steps. As a peer recovery specialist, he’ll talk with participants and accompany them in whatever activities they need—getting coffee, setting up a dentist appointment, accessing treatment (there is a 24/7 behavioral health treatment clinic in East Providence). Arene-Morley hopes these efforts will demonstrate the success of a proactive model.

Despite the current setbacks, Arene-Morley has “100 percent hope” for a future of LEAD in Pawtucket.

He acknowledges that his organization tried to introduce, develop, and implement the program in less than two years, which is a rapid timeline. Since LEAD relies on a collaborative effort, RICARES now needs to take the time to make sure all stakeholders are on-board.

Cox says it is not unusual to encounter pushback.

As he told the Indy, one of the reasons the National Support Bureau makes implementing LEAD a collaborative approach is so the agencies involved feel they have made the decision together, which prevents divisions from threatening the program in the longterm. In Pawtucket, the National Support Bureau will continue to provide peer-to-peer guidance so that all the partners can feel comfortable pursuing LEAD. +++ It is important to note that while LEAD currently relies on police discretion for enrolling participants, the ultimate reform goal is for substance abuse and mental health treatment to exist entirely outside the realm of law enforcement. To that end, it is critical that LEAD involves pre-arrest diversion, so it can work to eliminate the root causes of crime before people are ever caught up in the revolving-door cycle of incarceration. Effective criminal justice reform requires holistic public health responses, and resources invested in people and communities instead of in police and prisons.

LEAD is not an end-all solution to the racism, violence, and inequity embedded in the criminal legal system, but it is a first step toward rehabilitative, rather than punitive, justice. LEAD’s strength lies in its acknowledgment that the program deals with real human beings with dynamic lives, and recovery is not linear.

As program advocates like to say, LEAD is about meeting people where they’re at but not leaving them there.

RACHEL ROOD-OJALVO B’19.5 knows this article is the closest you’ll get to reading her 100-page urban studies thesis about LEAD in New Orleans.

METRO

06

METRO

DOGS AFFIXED

BY Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Lulian Ahn

Pet taxidermy, cloning, and mourning

At a business meeting, a woman walks my mom into an office and introduces her dog, Chelsea, a black-haired Chihuahua with slightly less desperate eyes than the breed generally sports. The dog is posed on the desk, among the paperweights and pens, stuffed and mounted on an armature. Chelsea passed away three years before and has graced the office desk ever since.

“She used to love to sit at my feet while I worked,” the woman sighs, tracing down the dog’s spine with a few fingers.

At least this is how I imagine the business meeting went. My mom came home afterward to announce that Agatha, our corgi mutt, would be stuffed post-mortem.

Not our other dog, Milo, who is neither as soft nor as spirited, but instead quite neurotic. I was sitting on the couch with Aggie and covered her ears as I objected strongly. She was still able to sense my tension and jumped off the couch to slink under my mom’s bed.

This is the mother who went vegan ten years ago, after reading a book titled Thanking the Monkey and who can’t stomach even hearing about roadkill. Although immune to my mom’s wish to preserve my dead dog’s body, I similarly don’t know what I will do without Agatha. One morning, waking up with Aggie curled under the covers next to me and suddenly desperate at the thought of losing her, I looked up dog cloning.

page, many of the dogs and cats are posed as sleeping— as though reminding us of their eternal sleep, or maybe because no soul can be found behind a pair of replica glass eyes. I also learn that some owners dye the hair on their pets’ faces to make them appear younger. One of the posts shows a dog posed sitting comfortably on a couch, its head lifted and ears perked at attention.

The caption reads, “When i took this photo of Nikki, i noticed as i was posting it that there is a reflection of her in the coffee table. I guess that’s an appropriate way to describe pet preservation…its a reflection of the animals life. A beautiful, tasteful, and dignified reflection that brings peace to those who understand that love doesn’t end at death” [sic].

Taxidermy may be a type of reflection, but it’s difficult for me to understand how it elevates itself from photography. Photographs, which also blur the boundaries between life and death (for it could be said that once a photo is taken, the subject that appears in it no longer exists as it did in that recorded moment), do so at a certain distance from the subject. Victorian families with the means to be photographed would pose dead children for lasting portraits to remember them by—a virtual suspension of decay. I do not understand the wish for a physical one: sure you can pet the object, but you feel death with every touch. What is in this memory that cannot be captured in a perfectly lit +++ image or a heartwarming video? My friend recently texted me a GIF she made from a video of her dead In ancient Egypt, animal mummification was common dog. It blinks nobly, and endlessly—handsome as ever, practice. The bandaged animals often look like heads forever. protruding from cylindrical bodies, akin to PEZ +++ dispensers. Their faces have eyes and snouts drawn onto the contours of the cloth, effecting an eerie For the taxidermy skeptic like myself, this is where dog doubling. Some animals were household pets mummi- cloning comes into play. Why reanimate or preserve fied so that they could spend eternity with their owners. a dead loved one, when you can just recreate them?

Others were bred specially to be killed and mummified Sooam, a dog cloning and research facility in South as sacrifices to the gods. In ancient Egyptian society, Korea, is at the forefront of the pet cloning industry. animals were so highly regarded that peoples’ treat- The homepage of its English website informs visitors ment of them largely determined whether they would that “Sooam not only performs dog cloning research, be admitted into the afterlife. My mom’s interest in but we also heal the broken hearts.” Right under this taxidermy does not subscribe to such holy ideals; the is a highlighted list of instructions for cooling your pet preservation of our dog will not ensure my mom an (wrap in wet towels and place in your fridge, not your eternal afterlife with Agatha. Instead, it seems to serve freezer) and retrieving viable live cells after death. For a much darker purpose, hanging on to the external the nominal sum of $100,000, Sooam guarantee you a body of the being—the shell of my dog—where her only replacement within five months. comfort is found in the feeling of Aggie’s fur stretched The reason this takes ‘so long’ is because there over stuffing. With fake glassy eyes and her favorite is currently no process for growing dog eggs in a lab. toys scattered at the foot of her perverted alter.

Instead, eggs must be “flushed” from “donor” dogs, I assumed my mom’s announcement was a knee- which only go into heat and ovulate twice a year. Then jerk reaction to her recent divorce. But five years a cell from the pet-to-be-cloned replaces the nucleus of after the fact, she is still adamant. I suggest compro- the egg, and is implanted in the womb of a surrogate mises: burial in the yard, with some decorative stones dog—specially bred to be docile and motherly. If the marking the spot; cremation and a blowing to the wind implant takes, after a gestation period of sixty days, on the favored hiking trail. a clone will be born into the world. (To confirm it’s a Grief is one of the most common and intolerable clone, however, its DNA will need be compared with afflictions, and when given the chance to work around that of the egg donor and surrogate mother to ensure it, it seems like many people will. In 2012, Animal that nothing got mixed up in the womb.)

Planet aired American Stuffers, a series that followed Seeing how much can go wrong during this the Arkansas-based company Xtreme Taxidermy and complex process, scientists incur simultaneous pregended each episode by reuniting an owner and their nancies in order to ensure at least one “good egg.” newly-stuffed beloved. It was canceled mid-season, Sooam claims a success rate of one in three surrogate after “The Yorkie a Hawk Tried to Carry Away” was dogs’ implantations and states that most abnormal aired, but before “The Cat Without a Nose” got any pregnancies terminate early on. However researcher screen time.

Rudolf Jaenisch, speaking to Vanity Fair in an article Across Animal Family Pet Preservation’s Facebook about dog cloning, said he finds its numbers unlikely.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

He states there are likely to be many genetic deformities with the embryos since “new” life is being created using DNA from old pets, which, after the course of their lifetimes, is more likely to have epigenetic abnormalities. Because of the multiple pregnancies, it is likely that customers will receive more than one clone.

Barbra Streisand became one of the world’s most notable cloners when she posed with two of her dogs, Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet, for Variety and revealed they were clones of her beloved deceased “Sammie,” short for Samantha. There were in fact three clones produced by ViaGen Pet, the company she paid $50,000 to clone her dog. Unable to take care of all three (imagine the energy of puppy triplets), she gave one to a close friend’s daughter. I would like to know how the giveaway clone was chosen, if it was based on looks or personality. Although genetically identical, clones do not necessarily look completely like their original model. (Sooam made forty-nine clones of Miracle Milly, the Guinness record holder for world’s smallest dog by height—a whopping 3.8 inches tall—to see if the smallness was genetic. All the clones ended up larger.) As for the personality of the clone, “You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul,” Barbra Streisand wrote in her New York Times opinion piece from 2018 defending her decision to become a cloner. “Still,” she continued “every time I look at their faces, I think of my Samantha… and smile.”

Streisand got her and Samantha’s smiles back, but at more than just a monetary cost. The toll that that grief exacted on her was exchanged for stresses placed on the dogs whose eggs are harvested, whose bodies are rented for reproductive purposes, and who are bred into sterile existence for the purpose of attempting to recreate a bond that has been irrevocably lost.

Most remarkable of all, the calculations made by dog cloning clients is this: the lifespans of the clones are still uncertain, since most of the existing ones are still in their single-digits. I am unconvinced the replication is worth it. It seems that the clones, imperfect recreations of an ideal, cannot be defined by anything other than their deviations from the original model. Clones are necessarily marked by loss, always missing pieces of their originals, and their owners must consistently be reminded of this painful difference. This wouldn’t be the case if cloners instead chose to adopt one of the many dogs left for dead in shelters. Yes, they would still grieve, but they would not see their dead dog constantly in their new one. Rather, they would gain the space to forge a new, meaningful relationship—one that isn’t predicated on the disappointing inability to live up to a previous lifetime. +++ For more than simply health reasons, we would not keep freeze-dried or taxidermied versions of our deceased human loved ones in the corner of our living rooms. Nor would we clone our mother after she passed away, to raise her body again from birth with new memories, a new personality, and a completely different relationship to us. When forced to, we can put our loved humans’ bodies to rest. However, should human cloning come about, the urge we see with animals to suspend or ‘reverse’ death could apply to our bodies as well. (People have already been cryogenically frozen in order to be reanimated if or once the technology to do so develops.) For now, though, we only attempt to circumvent grief’s potent effects with respect to our animal companions—bending the conventions surrounding death. We can do this, in part, because the animal-human relationship is already a fantastical one: predicated on a love that is pure yet conditioned­ , dominant and subservient, protective and protected, and most importantly, unspoken.

EMMA KOFMAN B’20 should not be preserved in a jar.

SCIENCE AND TECH

08

THERE'S STILL SOMETHING SOMETHING IN THE WATER The public health crisis of Providence's lead pipes

BY Peder Schaefer, Deborah Marini, and Ricardo Gomez ILLUSTRATION Franco Zacharzewski DESIGN Cecile Kim

The Providence Water headquarters in Lower South Providence is wedged between Mashapaug Pond— contaminated, still, from toxic waste emitted by the old Gorham silver spoon factory—and a set of old train tracks. It’s a low building topped with an assemblage of solar panels and the “PW” logo emblazoned on the facade. Inside the front set of doors is a customer service window through which you can spot dozens of phone operators taking calls about utility bills, water quality, and, maybe, lead.

Through the back doors are the administrative and engineering offices. There is a pair of turnstile security gates at this entrance, but if you can get a pass and are buzzed through, there is a small museum that documents the history of the utility. They have models of old wooden pipes that once ran under the city, quaint compared to the huge cast-iron mains and lead services that now lie beneath the streets of Providence.

In an austere conference room off the museum, the College Hill Independent met with a team of five Providence Water engineers to learn more about how they’re trying to manage a water system whose problems are sprawling. The Providence Water system has 13,800 homes serviced by a lead pipe and, from 2010 to 2017, failed to meet EPA standards in the 90th percentile of homes tested for lead in the water seven out of those eight years.

Lead has been a problem in Providence for decades.

The 1970s saw efforts to educate the public and reduce blood lead levels, especially in children. An aging housing stock and years of leaded gasoline had primed Providence to be one of the leading lead hotspots in the country. Government and community intervention in lead paint and dust reduction has been successful, reducing childhood lead levels in Providence ten-fold, but it’s only since 2010 that lead in the Providence water system became a more pressing concern.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Laura Brion, the executive director of the Childhood Lead Action Project, told the Indy. “Local concerns about lead in drinking water have paled in comparison to concerns regarding lead in paint and soil. In part, this is justified because of how big the threat of lead and paint in soil is for children locally, but if we didn’t have that context I think that the problems with lead in our drinking water would be headline news on a regular basis.”

To address the sprawling problem completely, the City must account a number of issues: the immediacy of lead poisoning’s dangers, the geography of the water distribution system, the public-private nature of the utility, the financial limitations of universal lead pipe replacement, and the systematic inequalities prevalent in most environmental pollution.

The team of engineers offered insight into their comprehensive approach to tackling a crisis that, as it stands, has no one clear answer. The meeting yielded explanations of corrosion control, pipe remediation, loan programs for private pipe replacement, and public education.

Yet, lead remains, and so the question persists: are these efforts enough?

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METRO

+++ Federal regulators set limits for the amount of lead acceptable in drinking water at 15 parts per billion, but in reality, no level of lead is safe. Lead is a heavy metal that settles in the bones and bloodstream through the ingestion of tainted water, dust, or paint chips. And when children consume lead, they can develop severe neurological problems.

“We worry most about the threat of lead to the developing brain,” Brion told the Indy. “It has the potential to cause a traumatic brain injury which can then lead to all sorts of trouble down the road.”

According to Brion, lead can affect memory, impulse control, and behavior. The biggest threat exists for children under the age of six, who are likely to be exposed to lead dust and chips while playing outside.

Lead poisoning is also a larger threat to marginalized groups. “Lead can impact people regardless of their location, but it does disproportionately affect low-income communities, communities of color, and immigrants,” KellyAnn Cameron, an AmeriCorps VISTA member working with the Childhood Lead Action Project, told the Indy. She attributed this to the fact that not all literature about lead is available in multiple languages and that landlords tend to not maintain their properties with the same diligence of homeowners.

Although soil and air-based dust—a remnant of decades of leaded gasoline—and paint chippings are the most potent sources of lead in the environment, lead-contaminated water should also be an urgent concern for Providence residents. +++ But how does lead get into the water in the first place?

Providence Water’s main reservoir and treatment plant is in Scituate, 11 miles west of Providence.

From there, water flows in huge cast-iron or concrete pipes, most over 50 inches in diameter, eastward to Providence and the other cities and towns in the distribution system.

But these “mains,” even the old ones, are not Providence’s biggest lead threat. That would be the service lines, the smaller pipes that connect the mains to individual homes. For decades, these service lines were made out of lead due to its durability, pliability, and price, and these lines still service 13,800 of homes in the area today. Providence switched from installing new lead pipes in 1945, and since 1996 has spent $56 million to replace approximately 18,000 lead services, according to Providence Water.

Steve Hamburg, the chief scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund and a Providence resident, explained to the Indy that his own home on College Hill had a lead service line when he bought it over 20 years ago. He paid to have his private service line replaced, but he believes that Providence Water should be replacing all service lines, both public and

private, whenever they replace a main in the street.

That way, private citizens won’t be tasked with rectifying a public health risk.

The distinction between public and private service lines is a critical distinction within the Providence Water system. The public side of the service line runs from the main in the street to the curb of the home.

Providence Water owns this section of piping, and every time they replace a main, they also replace that portion of the line. However, the private side, running from the curb into the home, is owned by the homeowner, which Providence Water does not replace regardless of lead levels.

“These service lines should be replaced, whether it's on the East Side or the South Side or Elmhurst or anywhere else in the city,” Hamburg told the Indy. “It’s one of these situations where a relatively straightforward solution has been avoided for unknown reasons, and in low income neighborhoods you’re going to see higher exposures.” But the reasons are not entirely unknown, with Providence Water’s policy largely driven by adherence to federal laws and the binds of financial constraints. +++ A utility’s responsibility to manage lead contamination started with the federal Lead and Copper Rule of 1991. The rule mandates that utilities test lead concentrations across a sample of customer taps based on which would likely have higher lead levels as a result of proximity to lead service lines. When the tests indicate lead concentrations over the action level in more than 10 percent of the samples, the utility is mandated to reevaluate corrosion control practices, conduct public education, and begin public lead service line replacements. Providence Water’s Water Main Rehabilitation Program was made to execute this mandate, and lays out how, over the 2019 construction season, about 16 miles of distribution mains will be rehabilitated in three service areas from late-March to November.

Back at Providence Water headquarters, Gregg Giasson, the executive engineer and deputy general manager at Providence Water, explained how Providence Water decides where and when to replace pipes. He’s been with Providence Water for six years, and has seen the utility through the entirety of its lead mitigation efforts.

All decisions about where to replace pipes start with data collection. As federally mandated through the Clean Water Act, Providence Water collects 300 samples from across their system, which includes the entire northern half of Rhode Island, every six months.

Test bottles are left out on the doors of selected customers, filled by those customers, and picked up by Providence Water employees, who send them to a lab for independent testing.

Providence Water also analyzes calls about water quality, historical information on the age and material of certain pipes, and details about pipe conditions collected during repairs.

22 MARCH 2019

“There are twelve criteria,” Giasson told the Indy.

“Water quality, condition, flow, pipe material, areas that have low flow, and a bunch of other criteria that we use. So we take those criteria, we score the pipes within our system, and that ranks them from most in need to be replaced to the ones least in need.” Giasson said that water quality, which includes the presence of lead in the water, is the most important benchmark, and that decisions about where to replace pipes in the city are made as an engineering team, taking into account the various benchmarks.

Providence Water’s lead mitigation program receives assistance from a board of six experts, which includes Marc Edwards, who was one of the original whistleblowers who called attention to the crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Information supplied by Providence Water shows that the East Side of Providence and College Hill neighborhoods were some of the first parts of the city to receive water main replacement since the program began in earnest in 2014. When asked why these areas, some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Providence, are being prioritized for replacement, Giasson said, “the East Side of Providence is probably the oldest section of our distribution system. We have 100-year-old pipes in those areas, so they shoot up to the top of the list because they’re the oldest part of our system, and also they’re farthest from our treatment plant so the water takes the longest to get there.”

Providence Water declined to share with the Indy the data that they use to prioritize certain areas. +++ Under the Lead and Copper Rule, water utilities are required to provide the opportunity for lead service line replacement to all of their customers. The issue is that Providence Water only has jurisdiction over the public mains and public service lines, and require homeowners to pay to replace their own private lines if they’re interested in replacement.

For those looking to replace their private side service line, Providence Water offers a 3-year, zero-interest loan program to help subsidize the cost, which averages $3,600 in Providence, according to Giasson.

Indeed, the first thing you see when faced with Providence Water’s website is a massive banner advertising this loan program. However, Giasson said that 100 people have taken up the offer so far, which is only 0.7 percent of the 13,800 homes currently linked to lead service lines. Because property owners can’t be compelled to pay to replace their lines, and because the utility-provided assistance is currently unsubstantial, most private lines are left unremediated.

Problematically, partial remediation actually leads to an increase in lead concentration levels for a period following the removal of the street lines.

“We advocate for full service line replacement because when you only replace half, there’s some evidence that suggests pretty strongly that partial service line replacement increases lead in the water,”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

said Cameron, the Childhood Lead Action Project employee, citing an EPA paper from 2011 that analyzed partial pipe replacement in Washington D.C. “To only replace half the pipe can be more dangerous, not less, as far as the data goes.”

But regardless of the health risks, the homeowner is liable for paying the private-side fee. Providence Water has neither the financial resources nor legal power to force homeowners to replace their lead service line. All homeowners want to replace their lead pipes, but for many, the cost of replacement is prohibitive, a fact evidenced by the only 100 people in the city who have taken up the zero-interest loan offer since its inception in 2018.

For customers who still have private lead service lines, Providence Water offers a number of ways to mitigate the amount of lead flowing into individual homes. Chief among these is the distribution of free water filters, typically Britas, to customers who have had the public side of their service line replaced, but not their private side.

Providence Water also distributes information using different pamphlets and printables and on social media: run the water until cold to make sure it is coming from the main in the street and not your lead service line, and water your plants before you fill a pot with water for cooking. The purpose of these steps is to flush out any water that may have been sitting in your lead pipe which may contain higher levels of lead particles. The only true solution to avoiding lead poisoning is comprehensive lead abatement, which these 'tips and tricks' do little to aid.

+++

side replacement.

But Providence Water is already running on a tight budget, and they’ve decided to prioritize main replacement over subsidizing private-side service lines. The Milwaukee program is made possible by funding specific to the replacement of private side lead service lines, in the form of state grants to Milwaukee Water Works, as well as funds in their budget allocated specifically for private lead line abatement. In the City’s current budget, Providence Water isn't delegated similar funding. +++ Lead is an invisible evil. It harms everyone who consumes it and disproportionately affects marginalized communities and children. Providence Water is taking what it considers to be the most comprehensive approach to battling this insidious beast, and has prided itself on its effectiveness, but this sense of contentment is neither justified nor acceptable until the city is free of lead’s toxic grip. Other cities, like Milwaukee, have taken new approaches to battling this crisis, finding new sources of funding to replace more of the most dangerous pipes in their system.

If lead contamination is to be addressed completely, then Providence Water needs to do more to help customers eliminate lead from their private lines.

“We want to see full replacement and removal of lead service lines,” Brion told the Indy. “It makes sense to do that in conjunction with the multi-year, multi-million dollar water main replacement program that is currently going on.”

In the meantime, Providence Water has created an online map that allows customers to check whether or not their homes are serviced by a “suspected or confirmed” private or public lead service line. The homes with lead lines are marked with orange dots, and those without, blue ones. The streets around College Hill have stretches of blue, but areas in Fox Point, Elmhurst, Olneyville, and almost every other neighborhood of Providence are stained with orange.

Zooming out even further, the City becomes a mix of orange and blue, contaminated and clean, revealing all that’s hidden beneath these streets.

When discussing how Providence Water’s methods compare to other utilities in the country, Giasson said that, “a lot of [other utilities] look to us and what we do.

They really like how our program works…so we tend to be a leader in the industry.”

However, The Health Impact Project, a collaborative study between the Pew Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Trust, highlights cities with more progressive programs than Providence’s. They look to Milwaukee as an example of a model policy that promotes full lead service line replacement. There, the city’s water system prioritizes replacing the entire PEDER SCHAEFER, RICARDO GOMEZ, AND service line, not just the public side utility. If the city DEBORAH MARINI B’22 are sponsored by Brita©. replaces the public side of the service line, either for planned pipe renewal or on an emergency basis, the city will replace the entire service, private included, at no cost to the homeowner.

Milwaukee is also using state grants to replace lead service lines at 300 day care centers and 300 other at-risk residences in the city. Additionally, the city subsidizes replacements by property owners of the private side service line by making homeowners responsible only for the first third of replacement costs—typically about $1,600. Increases in water prices are paying for the public side replacements, and increases in property taxes are helping fund the private

METRO

10

EXIT INTERVIEW WITH MY GRANDMOTHER

My grandmother serves me small lunches she likes to call gourmet. Ham, whole wheat, mustard, assorted cookies my mother brings my grandparents from the market across the street. A few spoonfuls of soup, split pea in winter and gazpacho in summer. My grandfather offers guests ginger ale a few times, forgetting he’s already done so. Sometimes he offers wine, but it is too early for wine. We eat around a cramped kitchen table with the A/C rumbling and a view of 76th Street out the long corner window.

My grandparents have lived in this house for over half a century, and they do not not leave it anymore: a tendency which began with my grandmother’s fear of slushy street corners—plus osteoporotic hips—which gradually lost its rationale over the years, particularly in summer, when ice wasn’t an obvious concern.

The last day I visited them before returning for my final months in Providence, my grandmother served me tuna fish salad; she said she hadn’t made it in a long time. Then she noted that nowadays, most people in the obits seem to die at ninety-four. She seemed very positive about this. Not too bad, we agreed. I briefly thought about the fact that she knew exactly what her statement meant, as in: three years to go. In what ways was she counting? Then I ate more tuna fish, and added pepper, as per her suggestion.

She also had my grandfather bring us the latest New Yorker, pointing to an “exit interview” with the “radical lesbian artist” Barbara Hammer, who lived with cancer for thirteen years before her death this week. My grandmother is interested in whether my generation treats homosexuality as nonchalantly as characters do in the contemporary fiction she’s reading lately, and I laugh, wondering if this is an opening, and instead I say depending on who you hang out with, I think, yes.

In the interview, Hammer says that “the wonderful thing about dying is the interesting processes. I find it fascinating as an artist and as a writer.” I questioned whether my grandmother—who is not yet physically dying but considers these years the “end of her life”— sees this time this way, as curious and instructive. I hoped so, but I also didn’t have the time to ask, which could serve as a heavy-handed metaphor for how I will feel in a few years time about all the conversations we never had. That day, I didn’t have time to ask because I left my grandparents after approximately an hour and a half at the kitchen table. I more or less always stayed for an hour and a half. They were easy to say goodbye to; the relationship functioned as it did because they knew I had other things to do—unlike a friend or a parent, they wanted me to have better things to do.

They blessed me as I went. We have naches from you! my grandmother wrote in her unfastened hand on a birthday card from 2014. Because I don’t know any

11

FEATURES

Yiddish, she included definitions. Naches meant the weren’t that many “others” anyway, since, as she esteem derived from one’s children or grandchildren. reminded me, almost everyone she had loved besides I suppose I had yicches, the esteem derived from one’s her husband had died before her. elders.

I couldn’t grasp the seventy years between us. She had As I went, I noticed that the elevator in their building lived in her own mind so long and I thought she must be had been recently renovated: the oversized and satis- desperate to get out. I personally felt panicked knowing fying buttons of my childhood had vanished, giving that at ninety-two, if I am lucky to live that long, I will way to a white, glossy interior, too sleek for deterio- still be in this mind, with my thoughts. Sometimes I rating pre-war. There were all sorts of problems with wanted to turn it off and to sit in silence with nothing the building by now—it was built in 1926, the same year more to think, or else think entirely different thoughts my grandfather was born, and he didn’t say much that from entirely different perspectives, which, I suppose, afternoon on account of dementia but he did say that as is why people meditate and do drugs, respectively. a person born in the year 1926, he knows what it means for a body to decay.

On the contrary, my grandmother did not seem desperate. Unsurprisingly, she had never learned to +++ meditate and did not care to alter her state of mind beyond a single glass of sherry. She must have figured My own house in Providence, the place I consider out years ago that it wasn’t so bad to remain in one home, sits halfway between my grandparents’ apart- mind, that that was why things got interesting. ment and a city I couldn’t stop thinking about in the summertime, when I thought the Maine coast sounded I had the rest of my life to discover this fully. Then refreshingly cool and salty. When I finally visited for again, “the rest of my life” was a strange phrase. Adults a weekend, it was deep winter and Portland’s streets keep telling me things will fall into place, as though the were treacherous, temperatures fluctuating so much pieces of a life fall like blossoms, as they would in the that the ice melted and re-froze daily. middle of May. By then, I would have graduated, and then the next stage would come—hopefully that would On our last day, I stepped outside one of those gas-sta- all fall into place too, no longer blossoms but autumn’s tions-turned-coffee-shops, leaving my friends to tear dead leaves. into the last of a set of pastries by themselves while I called my grandmother for her birthday. It seems I’m It seemed far away now, but there’s that educational ninety-two. Ninety bloody two. She asked me what I video that shows that as you grow older, time really was reading, and then she said goodbye. I relished this does speed up, because one day becomes an increasbrevity, a natural trait I had not inherited. ingly infinitesimal fraction of the total time you’ve lived. So however fast the last six months had passed, So do you think Grandma might die before Grandpa? the ensuing six would—scientifically!—appear to pass I asked my parents on the phone a few days later. even faster.

You know, we’re starting to think that might be a real +++ possibility. They had begun referring to this phase as “Grandma’s retreat,” which sounded like she was “Despair,” Fanny Howe writes in The Deep North. “It’s in Florida or maybe on a chaise on an Alaskan cruise, an ancient feeling and is born in each person. Despair, where she would see icebergs calving for the first time. the word, came like a sweet-dropping medicine, a coat of taste for her fear. Never had a word had such reverBy “retreat,” they pointed to an enclosure they berating power for her.” saw my grandmother beginning to shroud around herself. Different from agoraphobia, I observed her I was asking what did the rest have in store? A huge, moving inward—a shift from her novelistic person- foolish question. My grandmother approached a sepaality, frequent gasps and exasperated sighs summing rate question: what did death have in store? I believed to the soundtrack to a dramatic but comic worldview. the answer to both was absolutely nothing. This She was the heroine in a tasteful Broadway theatre, sounds too harsh, but last summer, waiting for Maine, another one of the joys she gave up when she stopped I lay around in the heat of the third-floor apartment venturing outside. in Providence with my window stretched wide, no defense against blow flies, and reread too much Chris Yet she now performed this retreat matter-of-factly, Kraus. That’s where I came across the Howe. without fanfare. People sometimes say that elderly people get nicer as they age, but my grandmother “Both of us share with the real Kathy Acker this horror of wasn’t acting more docile. It simply seemed like she completely making shit up,” Kraus said to Olivia Laing was ready—I’ve seen quite enough, thank you very much— in an interview in The Paris Review last September. and was unabashed about letting others know. There This is exactly where I located Howe’s despair: not only

22 MARCH 2019

On 76th between Columbus and Amsterdam, a ninety-two year old woman is reading Sally Rooney

so, where would we go? Manhattan will be saved, they wrote in the aughts. This month Bill de Blasio proposed expanding our shoreline into the East River. Make it bigger!

My grandparents don’t need to answer the Browns’ questions directly: another generational divide. Their apartment is on the 9th floor, where utility bills are still going up. Even if waters rise decades before expected, there they will sit, running out of money—islands unto themselves, as the city does what the city does all around them. In some ways they are untouched there, and also, they are trapped.

Plenty of my cousins are in their late thirties, old enough not to have focused on climate in some decisions about their imminent future—rather than the questions of when to have kids, how many, whether to stay in Brooklyn once they did—and thus already raising two children under four. One weekend when we go to visit them in a neighborhood overrun with toddlers, my friend suggests that I’m not serious about what I’m saying, which is that maybe I’m not having children because of future precariousness. Meanwhile, I’m reaching to touch my baby cousin, who is named Hart, after her mother and my mother, and who has recently learned to laugh, a skill I did not previously realize I had learned.

Humans have been doing that for thousands of years, my friend argues. Humans have been having children assuming they will be born into a fine sort of world in meaninglessness (absolutely nothing), but mainly and then something happens—bomb, famine, war. in the subsequent falsity of any forged, fabricated Suddenly the world is no longer hospitable to that child. meaning. I knew that everything I deemed important If that never stopped us before, why now? was totally made up.

In an interview of author Sheila Heti in the Los Angeles When I called my grandmother on the phone after the Review of Books last May, Kate Wolf tiredly reminds us shootings in Pittsburgh last fall, she asked if I were that “the world is overpopulated and the earth is overcalling all the old Jewish women in my life. You’re my taxed by humanity. But that doesn’t solve the problem old Jewish woman! I replied. Then I apologized, though of possibly wanting [children] or not, does it?” After I didn’t know for what. It only confirms my belief to writing a book about ‘modern motherhood’ sans a fully never step foot in a temple before I die, she said, wryly. developed contemplation of climate change, Sheila Then paused, and said: You find yourself at the end of Heti agrees with my friend. “We are built to destroy all your life in the same place you began. She grew up in the life on earth, and ourselves. People aren’t going to stop Depression, was abandoned by her biological father; having children for environmental reasons if they feel her husband fled northern Germany in the late thirties. they want them.”

Like many nonagenarians, I thought they had lived through, well, a lot. I wanted the world to be less fucked I remember how I used to figure into Heti’s descripup now than it was when she came into it. To lie and tion of child-desire, talking obnoxiously loudly on say it were different when it was essentially the same public transportation about how beautiful it would be would constitute another rendering of Kraus’s bullshit to have a baby with whichever woman I was currently mechanism. in love. Specifically, I contemplated who would look +++ more interesting pregnant, with an outstretched belly button—our own experiment with the limits of our I have no way of knowing how different this moment is bodies. The baby would be a girl, and it would have her from all the moments that came before it. To move in eyes, obviously. circles had a kind of sick logic to it, but I also thought it possible that my grandmother was wrong: this moment But this January I read that it’s possible the baby, were it may very well be different. Maybe it’s even singular. to be born between 2025 and 2035, when temperatures will diverge across the globe, would be more likely to be There are signs that the world is ending, and I want to a boy, because embryonic sex ratios deviate depending make it clear that we talk about disaster all the time. on the temperature-stress of pregnant mothers. The Sitting on couches a little high, morbidly discussing boy would also have a significantly increased risk microplastics, how the ocean glistens normally until of having a bad heart; mothers exposed to higher you run your hands through it. Pasta strainers. I walk temperatures during pregnancy are more likely to give home alone on a wet night and try to ignore the discus- birth to infants with congenital heart problems. I am a sion, its cynicism. Ultimately, this willful oblivion fairly neurotic person, and I think if I were pregnant in makes it easier to drive in a car, my parents’ as it speeds the summer months post-apocalypse, I would worry out of Manhattan while the sky is growing orange, about such a thing. and forget that things won’t always be this way—in +++ less than half the time I’ve already lived, things won’t be this way ever again. Climate activists have long So, peering out on a lifetime of uncertainty, I am insisted that Howe’s ancient facet of despair is espe- circling around preparation. In two months, I’ll gradcially justified right now, even obligatory. But in “How uate from college, and I want to vomit at the notion that to Survive the End of the World,” healers adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown speak candidly about what it might mean to face apocalypse. They pose questions with perceptible answers, ones that might aid us in dealing with the dread and doubt of our particular generational circumstance in less abstract terms. What do you pack? Get your friends together, the Browns say. Sit down and figure it out: who knows about weather patterns; who can make jam, or can; who do you trust with your life?

BY Lily Meyersohn ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

someone might consider that trite social marker significant enough to write about. But compelled to consider multiple selves—who I have been and how I regret her and who I would prefer to be—instead I will write about anything but that marker, and you will know, still, that this essay is not about my grandmother, not about motherhood nor climate change. I am only talking about a precipice.

I have this dream in which my grandmother stands alone on the deck of a ferry leaving an island, the foghorn blowing loud, and long, and surprising every time. A cloud soaks her, condensation bound to the withered contours of her cheeks. The horizon is invisible, there is that much fog. No place where the ocean meets the sky, no place to find an edge and clutch it.

Just the endless blue. She thinks she will die out there, and yet, she stays. She is prepared: to brace herself, put out her feet, and purposefully leap—despite what she finds below. Very sure, in fact, that she won’t find anything at all. +++ Can I learn from my grandmother’s practices? With no weather patterns ahead, neither rhyme for jam nor reason to can, all she can do is know, with every bit of certainty she has, that the only thing that lies before her is the unknown itself.

Her own answers to Howe’s despair come, then, in little things. Unconcerned acts, but deliberate. She has long been the first to read The New York Review of Books, thus knowing about young, hip authors like Sally Rooney before anyone my age, weeks ahead of Twitter. In January she presses Conversations with Friends on me.

I will call her in a week or two to tell her my thoughts, when I have finished the novel and passed it around to my friends.

My grandmother will speak concisely then too, and in doing so, she will reach out to another version of herself she perhaps sees in me, as if to give solace. One day I might look back on myself in just the same way, ciphers now revealed. For now, though, I will visit my grandmother for lunch the next time I am in New York for a moment, and I will hold her hand lightly and I will not say I do not want you to die but I will think it, and then I will go again.

Convinced there would be no books in that place either, and given that she had always read many books, now she read the biggest ones. The words came like a sweet-dropping medicine, a coat of taste for her fear.

Whole volumes of Proust again—patiently lined up on the shelf above their still-shared bed and its waterlilied covers, where she sits as others tie and untie the small leather boats of her shoes—and a biography of Frederick Douglass that is so heavy that when she picks it up it turns the thin skin of her wrists blue. Then yellow. Soon, when the skin returns to its clean and otherwise unmarked folds, it will become impossible to see the trace.

LILY MEYERSOHN B’19 is looking forward to seeing her grandmother next weekend.

Because the signs are still only that, I haven’t started to ask questions this concretely. But sometimes I wonder: Would my parents ask me to leave them behind? Would I pack up my things, and the friends I hold tightest, a partner, if I have one, and drive away this fast? And if

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

12

INTESTINES, AND HOW WE WERE NEVER BORN

content warning: dead bodies

is no me, or everything else is also me. Growing up in a Buddhist community, I was often reminded of this philosophy. Although I’ve thought about these ideas less habitually now that I’m in college, they were still I’m five years old, waiting alone in my mom's office at the the first thing on my mind when I learned that bacteria Zen Buddhist practice center she helps run. I don’t like in my intestines are controlling my brain. being alone here. There’s a poster on the inside of the office door that I can never bring myself to look at straight-on +++ and unflinchingly; I can only glance at it sideways with horror and fascination. It shows eight or ten illustrations 100 trillion bacteria live in a human body, most of forming a time-lapse, beginning with a Buddha-like figure them in the intestines. The study of the gut-brain link meditating under a tree. In the first frame, the figure dies, is a burgeoning field, and the past decade has seen and each subsequent frame shows it in a more advanced a spike in both scientific journal articles and dieting state of decomposition. Its skin turns red and then a website listicles on your crucial entrails. According to mottled blue. Foxes and squirrels carry away its intestines. the Journal of Medicinal Food, our gut microbiome is Soon it is just a skeleton there, in a sitting position under intimately tied to brain function: Gut bacteria directly the tree. Finally, even the skeleton disintegrates, leaving stimulate neurons, sending signals to the brain via the only dust. I look at this time-lapse in the same way I would vagus nerve, which influences the timing and contilook at myself in the shower or the mirror. The figure is nuity of non-REM sleep. In other words, our guts allow nondescript, so it’s a little easier to imagine that it could us to get in a few hours of deep sleep before we begin be my body under that tree. I suppose if I needed to put it to dream. Biologists have found a growing number of into words, I would be asking, what is this body, really? At links equating gut composition with fear, stress, and what point does the disintegrating skeleton stop being me? mental illness: A recent study published in Nature When my skeleton turns to dust, have “I” been destroyed? Microbiology links depression to a deficiency in two types of gut bacteria. Moreover, genetic variation We can think about the same question, in a less morbid between humans is surprisingly small for organisms way, through food and digestion. When you eat food, at that are so supposedly complex, which has led to specwhat point does it become part of you? When it enters ulation that humans’ so-called complexity may be your mouth? When you swallow? When the former- fully dependent on our inhabitant microbes, especially food exits your stomach? Of course, the nutrients our gut bacteria. absorbed from the food become part of you, but at what This news—apparent bacterial domination of the point? If those time-lapse images presented a vision of human mind—seems alarming when surrounded by the body’s decay into the environment, then digestion ideologies that privilege hyper-individualism, where is the decay of the environment into the body. What the concept of individual leadership appears more about poop, or the pounds of dead skin (one pound a important than community. Unless I happen to be year!) that are constantly flaking off us everywhere, reflecting on gut-self oneness, I tend to think of my onto tables and chairs, into our clothes, coming to rest thoughts and moods as belonging to an individual Me. in the lint screen of the dryer? Food and waste form a If I'm sad and can't place why, I'll roll with it and spin constant process of decay and renewal, with no perma- vast philosophical justifications of why I'm supposnent elements. Did this skin and feces stop being me edly a terrible person. Perhaps it’s better to think of when my body decided it was no longer useful? Or am I this sadness as a message from my intestines. From flushing a piece of myself down the toilet? one perspective, bacterial control of my brain sounds As soon as we enter the realm of digestion, the insidious, but from another perspective, their message self-other dichotomy quickly becomes indistinct, and could be constructive: They might be “asking” that I it’s unclear who died under that tree in the first place. eat more fiber to restore balance to my bacterial popuAs Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat lation levels. We are engaged in symbiosis, and thereHanh reminds us, “When we look deeply into living fore they aren’t separate from me. For every mood that beings, we find that they are made of non-living-being seeps from the bacteria into my mind, they rely on my elements. So-called inanimate things are alive also.” nutrients to live. “As we open and empty ourselves, we I depend on so much in order to exist that there is no come to experience an interconnectedness,” writes separation between me and other things: Either there Jack Kornfield in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle.

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“Each experience and event contains all others.” If I consider the Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness that I learned growing up, it’s possible to construe the gut-brain link as comforting rather than threatening. +++ I’m ten years old, climbing the ash tree in my backyard.

Growing up, I’ve had a close relationship with this particular tree. By age ten, I’ve memorized all the routes up the various verticals, gradually growing until I can bridge the gaps between specific branches. But today, once-reliable branches crack under my weight. The canopy has thinned out, the leaves are dying, even some of the upper verticals begin to topple. Suddenly I see the source of the problem: a complex of small holes, mathematically precise, drilled by some unknown entity, killing branches as they girdle them, allowing sap to flow down the trunks. Tree specialists later told me that birds —yellow-bellied sapsuckers—have been drinking the sap. By the time I know this, it is too late to do anything.

Symbiosis is not a concept specific to human bodies, of course. Gut flora serve as one case study for a process of interconnection that is perhaps more easily exemplified by entities in the (so-called) natural world. Human intestines are the latest in a long list of systems that have been misconstrued as isolated elements, and the effects of this misconception are often destructive. Another such system is trees in forests, which are engaged in a fascinating exchange with fungi. While some species of fungi attack plants, around 90 percent of Earth’s plants are tied in mutually beneficial relationships with fungal spores. In exchange for a slice from a plant’s sunlight-generated sugars, fungi help plants grow and absorb more water. Plants share fungi between each other as well. In 1997, Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia found that trees can exchange nutrients via a fungal connection that's now colloquially referred to as the “wood wide web.”

One teaspoonful of forest soil, according to Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, contains miles of such fungus threads. Shaded seedlings wouldn’t survive without larger trees sending them nutrients through the communal fungal network, and plants can even use fungi to send warning messages to one another about potential pests. One of the factors that made the ash tree in my backyard particularly vulnerable to sapsucker woodpeckers was its lack of involvement in such a forest network. Urban planners are not concerned with matters of forest symbiosis. Assuming

22 MARCH 2019

"This news—apparent bacterial

BY Seamus Flynn ILLUSTRATION Remy Poisson DESIGN Amos Jackson

domination of the human mind— seems alarming when surrounded by a mindset where ideologies of hyper-individualism are privileged"

that the trees are individuals, we’ve failed to realize their collectivity until now. And although there are important differences between trees and intestines, ignorance towards both of their multifaceted livelihoods is a product of the same hyper-individualized mindset that rashly assumes the human brain to be autonomous and supreme.

Trees are abstract, and it’s hard to equate them to humans in the first place. Termites, perhaps more relatable but equally misconstrued, also form similar systems of interdependence. According to an in-depth 2018 Guardian article exploring these oblong white critters, these systems are also reliant on fungus to function. When European colonizers first sliced open the mounds of Macrotermes termites in sub-Saharan Africa, they projected their own social hierarchies onto the bugs, labeling various “individuals” as workers, soldiers, kings, and queens. Today, popular perceptions of insect colonies often continue to mis-imagine them as miniature monarchies. But writer and naturalist Eugène Marais, in his 1937 book The Soul of the White Ant, argued that monarchic thinking obscured the true nature of the mounds. He called the termite mound a “composite animal,” with the hard-packed outer dirt as the skin, the central fungus as the stomach, the workers as blood cells, the soldiers as an immune system, and the queen as an ovary. Whether Eugène’s organ-centric analogies offer a perfect analog for the multifaceted tasks of termites is up for debate. But regardless, the projection of anthropocentric images onto insect colonies—whether it involves analogies of monarchies or factories—obscures the reality of the cell-like behavior of bugs.

Both trees and termites function as components of meta-organisms. Humans are caught in a similar dance with our guts: Bacteria are dependent on our bodies to survive, and in exchange they digest our food, regulate our sleep, and keep us healthy and alive, making ours a mutually beneficial relationship. If there are ways in which humans could be seen as meta-organisms too, without a conventional individual self, maybe we should stop anthropomorphizing ourselves so much.

Like bugs and plants, we too are caught in a web of indivisibility, living as constant echoes of our surroundings without any discreet, isolatable elements.

for the continued existence of hyper-individualism and gut bacteria, I see that time-lapse artwork on my mom’s oppression. This view is equally misguided. Absolute old office wall in a new light, for bodily disintegration is peace and absolute violence are human-produced spearheaded by these very same bacteria. The moment concepts, and the real world lies outside both of them. “I” die, my gut flora go rogue. They start to digest my body On the one hand, all the scenarios I’ve mentioned from the inside out, beginning with the intestines, then contain violence in some way: Different species of the surrounding tissues, and, finally, making their way trees out-compete one another for shade; termites tear through capillaries, destroying my heart and brain. Some down trees; sapsucker woodpeckers also eat trees; and, of them were beneficial over the course of my life. Others if left outdoors in the right place, the human body is were simply waiting in my gut, biding their time until this eaten after death by those foxes and squirrels from the moment. Like the figure under the tree in that time-lapse time-lapse illustration. But on the other hand, exam- illustration, they open up my former body to the elements. ples like plants, bugs, and your guts challenge this oppressive simplification. The Zen Buddhist teachers This image might seem terrifying. A National in my life have also taught me about the importance of Geographic blurb titled “You're Surrounded by Bacteria balancing seemingly contradictory truths. We musn’t that are Waiting for You to Die,” written with all the get lost in the absolute truth of oneness, for the relative sensationalism of a horror movie trailer, describes truth of everyday functioning is equally important. the process this way: “As soon as you die, your body The idea of oneness, when properly balanced with essentially gets its first break from a war that it has relative experience, does not imply a passive peace- been fighting every moment of your life.” That logic is fulness, but rather inculcates social responsibility. superficially sound. Were it not thanks to our immune Ideals of interconnection have the potential to reveal system, our body's resident bacteria would infect and an innate urgency to problems of unjust violence kill “us.” But the essentialization of “war,” the assumpagainst people everywhere, regardless of whether I tion of a battle against outsiders, misses out on the appear to be directly affected. If the self does not end ways digestive bacteria not only benefit us, but are inteat the body, then hoarding wealth, acting only on gral to our well-being and consciousness. What right one’s desires without regard for communities, and do I have to believe that I am at war with my bacteria benefiting from oppressive systems without working when, as I write this, they are not only digesting my to dismantle them, are all revealed to be self-destruc- food, but possibly crucial to my very thoughts? Seeing tive actions. If everything is, in a sense, my body, then existence as war is inaccurate and harmful; I’m not the bursting of a Canadian pipeline sends oil into my fighting to stay alive, I’ve always been alive in some bloodstream. Oneness is absolute truth. And relative form or another. Thich Nhat Hanh also writes, “We truth—the specifics of the stories in the moment—is think that we exist only from this point in time until equally important. People experience violence differ- this point in time, and we suffer because of that notion. ently based on identity and ideology, and the fact that If we look deeply, we will know that we have never been violence disproportionately affects some more than born, and we will never die.” others is just as important as the idea of interconnecReframed this way, the time-lapse of the decomtion. Both of these concepts are crucial if I am to incor- posing meditator doesn’t display an ending, but porate the truth of oneness into a political agenda, if I another step in a symbiotic process. That way, it’s am to actually learn something from trees and termites easier to not be alarmed if I imagine that person as me. rather than treating their functioning as fun facts.

Rather than believing myself to be fighting to exist as an “individual” against all odds, I try to see decom+++ position as one last stroke of symbiosis. Bacteria have given me my body. One day, I will give it back to them.

Fast-forward to whenever I die. Given new information on SEAMUS FLYNN B’21 is about to go poop now.

+++ Descriptions of symbiotic interconnectedness and porous meta-entities can easily be likened to idealized images of peace and harmony as some natural order of the universe. There are those who would accuse me of being a naive hippie by arguing for oneness at all.

‘Nature’ is often held up as either end of an extreme: absolute oneness or absolute individualism. On the flip-side of peaceful idealism, the non-human world is also depicted as an anarcho-capitalist free-for-all, ruled by natural selection and held up as a justification

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE & TECH

14

STORY & ILLUSTRATION Cam Collins DESIGN Justin Han

Duck Chainsaw kisses the barren ground with their tools, they look so hot and cool today in the sun.

Steel arch has no effect on them because they are sunken with steel everyday. They roll like motorcycle to large steel arch and decide to saw it in half with warm glory, and everyone loves the shards that the destruction donates. Many of the people in the crowd, including the informed ones with World Wide Web, start eating the steel because it looks nice in the sun and everything looked nice in the sun because the arch was finally gone. There is much more red to see with that piece of mere furniture banished! Living with a red sky for so long is a double edged sword that gleams so well, especially on certain people. Especially on people who are in control of the red sky. The Mayor himself has had his position for years, and the only color he felt he ever needed to know was red. He only needed to know the sun, his sun. Mayor’s head goes mad and remembers they had a “child person.” His new shoes look like fresh steel. They look so good in the sun. Everyone sees it.

Lost Nevada has a red sky but it’s never violent to anyone who’s born there, only the ones that visit.

Because of this, the tourism rate is low and their traditions are preserved well. This is not to diminish what a red sky would do, however. These kept traditions —things like embracing cold metal and creation, or letting your emotions “come outside” for a day—are often the #1 cause of death in this town. Extremity is what the town lives and dies off of. This is only the air of it though—the people in this town are not naturally dumb.

Why, there is one person coming right now. There is nothing to say, nothing to come out of their mouth, and not much to speak of their appearance, no one had much say of it. People found it a bit intimidating.

Continuing down the hall this person goes, they’ve made it clear they’re upset about something. Fury and frustration in this town are recurring characteristics caused by the red, but it is undoubtedly a necessary essence within this town. This person is frustrated due to a marriage, her father’s marriage—the Mayor of Lost Nevada’s marriage. He is getting married today and he is handsome. “People like the sun because it makes them feel this way,” thought the Duck.

The Duck Chainsaw is who we saw strolling past.

It is what. The Duck Chainsaw is an automatic and perfectly maneuverable 12kg yellow chainsaw made to intimidate passersby. Customized machinery eats people here but Duck Chainsaw works it out, and they use it to get what they want. Still a respectable person, they dress to go to their father’s wedding.

Future Mrs. Nevada is thinking.

Mr. and Mrs. Nevada have sunken under steel arch used for every marriage since Lost Nevada was found.

“Dramatic?”

The sun doesn’t look good on anyone today, they are fatigued with steel arch used too long. They hate steel arch now because they can’t see the Handsome Mayor or the Pretty Wife. Their appearances were so attractive they could make most people in the town forget about things like the red sky, or their own friends. However, making people forget about things that should’ve mattered wasn’t their goal. They want to end Lost Nevada but don’t know where to start— having recently heard of the World Wide Web, and seen a bunch of things they might be into. Things like cakes, string, stones, guitars, flowers, and different kinds of weddings. The informed and unextreme are calm, and the informed and extreme are not at this wedding because they had motorcycles, the World Wide Web, and as always, the red sky.

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LITERARY

“It’s the club again….” the old man says.

“What would you like this time?”

After the old man asks his normal question, the planet Earth strikes their view.

“We’d like a few buildings, as always.”

“Well, you have to be more specific.” There is always more and more things being made on Earth... that planet...don’t you think they have enough? You guys are really doing them a favor! What size, shape, regi—” “We’ll take them all!!”

The group threw as many stars as they could from their pockets at the old man, paying a small fortune all together. The old man looks at his reward with satisfaction, letting go of any guilt he had about what he sells.

Stars are stars after all, always will be. With the stars sitting in the old man’s lap, he takes time to stare at the clear shining twinkles, fully grown and laughing, despite the lack of a body. Maybe it is a sad fate, but the stars lacked characteristics that made them sentient.

This is why they are moved around and exchanged as people please—they are pretty, yet unrelatable. +++ The girls are Skymall Club. Made up of 8 celestial angels, and the existence of the club has been collectively diagnosed with affluenza by god, and they’ve accepted their fate. Through their riches of taking stars, they have been able to buy whatever they want from different planets of any kind. Today in space, they had finally gotten a nice little bonus—the stars are birthing themselves again! There is more for the taking. They swim through space and take these stars to increase their wealth. The stars sit there in deep space and are often too bright for the others to look at, but the club gets what it desires, and their own eyes know

that—throw caution and pain to the wind. The burning and blinding light becomes a beacon, the sharp, stabbing heat simply becomes warmth. To those who desire it, it becomes anything but harmful. There is no problem with getting rid of stars in the short term: they only take away the view for the people who necessitate stars for seeing. The angels do not know about this, however. They barely know humans exist. They only know that property exists. They find beauty in what they find on planets, and the idea of “man-made” has no bearing on them. What they see is what the planet is.

They’ve had their eyes on Earth for quite a while, and they’ve bought from there before. They are the reason Mt. Periodical is gone, the Great Tower of Asaty, and the dome of Sham vanished out of thin air and were never to be seen again. Oh, you’ve never heard of those?

The eight girls fly down to the atmosphere, the fire and pressure going down only gets them more excited.

They are hotter, more joyous. They have paid for what they wanted and they’ll get it with ease. Doulzia, Angel 8, has already prepped her shopping bag ready to take a few buildings. She takes Sears Tower, the Trump Tower, and a University of Chicago hospital. Hospitals were always popular among the angels, for its little bridges and things gave way to make interesting dioramas. Hotel shared the same boat, but the “things” they claimed to find in there were too excitable for their tastes. But as Seeg, Angel 6, proclaimed earlier, they were planning on taking everything today.

“If your hands are full, just throw it! Throw it into the sky!”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” said Dous, Angel 2. She is the youngest of the bunch, and joined a few centuries ago. She goes for the tinier huts and houses normally found in places like farms and 3rd world countries, but those have been scavenged before because the Old Man sold them for very low prices. Dous must go into the larger urban areas to take contemporary buildings.

“It’s just too heavy! There’s too much! Rrr!!” Dous continues to struggle to keep up with the club’s chaos.

Dous takes a break, looking over the large empty space that’s been created. It is the face of cleanliness, the empty spaces and patches. From where the angels fly, the Earth could have always been skin. They pay with stars to clean the planet and to gain more. This is the intended nature of things, as thought. Dous, in her struggle, tries to go back to her roots and scavenge for smaller areas. A few huts there, a few tents there, a few small community centers, yada yada. These things shared similarity to the stars, they are pretty, yet unrelatable. This made Dous feel humble, as she would take what the others just couldn’t bear to see. Through her small journeys, she has even learned to parse some information about the buildings.

“Built then? What does built mean?”

Thought to be grown, the only thing that constantly confused the Club was the color of things on Earth. It seemed mismatched, like there was something not right and too correct at the same time about it.

“We’ll ask the Smarter Ones about it later.” was always Doulzia’s line if the topic was raised. Still, after their few raids to Earth, no one still knew most of what was going on in this blue skinned planet. +++ A cute red house to be taken for her kit, Dous is excited and begins to rip off the small island the house sits on.

A brave human walks out! A human with eyes, and a mouth, and nose. She looks exactly like Dous does.

“Why does this bug look like me? I thought I was pretty!” says Dous.

The human cannot see Dous’ angel face, as she is wearing a normal mask, but Dous lets this information get to her. She leaves the human be, along with the small house. The other angels have already scoured the entire earth of all its centers and habitats. They have cleansed the world, and assuming every living thing within it. Dous looks at the island in her hands again and leaves it levitating in the Earth’s sky above the ocean. Dous keeps it a secret that she did not take everything she could, and flies back with the rest of the club. Despite everything different about the angels, the human cannot explain why she finds them pretty, yet relatable. The human looks up at the angels, smiling, knowingly.

22 MARCH 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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THE INDIVIDUAL UNIFORM Sartorial representation from the fig leaf to the turtleneck

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed together fig leaves and covering for themselves.

–Genesis 3:6-7

Thus begins the origin of fashion—the immediate aftermath of self-knowledge and original sin, curses that have haunted the industry ever since. The bare fig leaves of Adam and Eve have since transformed into a multitrillion-dollar business with vast economic, ecological, and human rights implications. Among the myriad of choice and variety available to the modern consumer stands a notable phenomenon: the individual uniform, the practice of wearing the same outfit every day. In opposition to the maximalist mantra “more is more,” the individual uniform undermines the established consumer dogma, radically changing the relationship between the wearer, their clothes, and the world around them.

Fashion is representation. Every morning, with varying degrees of consciousness, we decide who we want to be—or more often, how we want to be seen by others. Like all forms of representation, fashion fails to capture all aspects of the object it claims to represent. A layer of complexity is lost in the translation between the amorphous blob of human consciousness and the textiles, plastic, and leather that cover and shelter us; to represent is to reduce. Despite fashion’s limitations, humans have a strong, nagging desire to express themselves through any medium available, including through their clothes. The desire for expression through fashion, paired with the inability to properly and completely capture the vastness of the human experience, creates an immense feeling of frustration.

Dressing becomes an exercise in anxiety and neurosis, especially for young people. The individual uniform disrupts this problem on both sides of the equation: for some, the individual uniform is an embrace of reduction. The goal is no longer to articulate one’s whole humanity, but to present a purposeful caricature. For others, the uniform is a total denial of that desire for expression.

Gender complicates this paradigm: since a woman is expected to invest more time and energy into her appearance than a man, to reject variety in favor of uniformity is an assault to femininity. Social norms discourage her from adopting an individual uniform.

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ARTS

+++ Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck, Levi Strauss jeans, and New Balance trainers are the paradigmatic example of individual uniform as performance. Jobs was a design innovator, yet he shaped and was shaped by a modern business culture that prioritizes efficiency and profit, while paying lip service to creativity and ethical living; his uniform embodied this paradox. The Jobs uniform began with a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, where he learned that all workers in Sony factories wore uniforms as a way of bonding workers to the company.

Back in Silicon Valley, Jobs attempted to import the work-place uniform to Apple with—unsurprisingly— little success. Undeterred, he enlisted the help of famous designer Issey Miyake to create an individual uniform that projected a signature style: the turtleneck conveys intelligence and forward thinking, while the jeans and sneakers rebuked the IBM-corporate aesthetic that Jobs disdained. Combined, the uniform cemented Jobs’ legacy as radical-genius-visionary.

Beyond the mythology, Jobs will also be remembered as a salesman—a very good salesman. The uniform strengthened the relationship between Jobs and his product. Through his clothes Jobs became the iPhone— sleek, simple, standardized. He blurred the lines between consumer, producer, and good.

Similarly, Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer and former creative director of Chanel, embraced the individual uniform as reduction. Until his last days, Lagerfeld was rarely seen out of his signature black

suit; black sunglasses; leather gloves; high, starched, detachable collars; and powdered ponytail—think courtier meets vampire. Known for his terse wit and eccentricities, Lagerfeld has become a pop-culture icon. To sketch his most notorious quirks: totally enamored with the iPod, he owned 300 of them; had two maids for his cat Choupette; and lost 100 pounds in order to wear Hedi Slimane’s notoriously skinny clothes for Dior Homme. Beyond his idiosyncrasies, Lagerfeld transformed the fashion industry by codifying the conventions of ready-to-wear and transforming Chanel into a multibillion-dollar empire. To the public, Lagerfeld encapsulated a glamorous, fastidious genius—a sartorial Willy Wonka. Lagerfeld leaned in to his persona, once saying, “I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that … It is like a mask. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long.” The uniform was an essential part of Lagerfeld’s performance, reinforcing the stereotypes that surrounded him. The hair, suit, and collar revealed his anachronistic sensibilities; the sunglass gave off a cool aloofness; and the leather gloves displayed his biting edge. Lagerfeld demonstrates how the uniform can become a personal statement.

+++ While Jobs and Lagerfeld embrace the individual uniform and still meaningfully engage with fashion as representation, others use the individual uniform to distance themselves from fashion entirely. Within this subgroup, there exists serious disagreement: some deny self-expression in order to increase productivity in other areas of their life; some have individual uniforms as part of a larger philosophical pursuit—the denial of the ego.

When asked why he wears the same outfit every day—jeans with a gray t-shirt or hoodie—Mark Zuckerberg replied, “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible.” The underlying rationale is that choosing what clothes to wear—attempting to portray a unified self—distracts Zuckerberg from running Facebook, decreasing his productivity. By cutting out unnecessary decisions, Zuckerberg is able to live more

22 MARCH 2019

BY Bilal Memon DESIGN Wen Zhuang

"A layer of complexity is lost in the translation between the amorphous blob of human consciousness and the textiles, plastic, and efficiently. Decision fatigue, the tendency to make worse decisions as the number of choices increases, justifies the Zuckerberg uniform. In the 1990s, Florida State University professor Roy Baumeister concluded that our ability to make intelligent decisions throughout the day decreases because decisions made earlier in the day sap our mental energy. By decreasing the number of ‘trivial’ choices, Zuckerberg has more resources to spend on other, ostensibly more significant decisions. Zuckerberg’s decision to wear a uniform requires dubious normative judgements regarding which decisions are more important than others; to wear an individual uniform as a tool for productivity is to further commodify oneself as a profit-maximizing entity. We should note that it would be impossible for a female CEO to replicate the Zuckerberg aesthetic; she would not be taken seriously as a business-women.

Women in the workforce do not have the option to ignore their physical appearance.

While Zuckerberg’s philosophy fuels the corporate rat race, it raises an important question about the importance and effect of consumer fashion on the modern psyche: Do clothes add to our lives and lead to greater satisfaction? The ascetic would reply with an unqualified no. To engage in fashion is to feed one’s ego.

The frustration that results from want—in this case, the want to express oneself and find validation from others—is precisely the misery the ascetic attempts to overcome. The saffron robes of Buddhist monks epitomize such rejection of fashion. The Buddha reflected, “Properly considering the robe, I use it: simply to ward off cold, to ward off heat, to ward off the touch of flies, mosquitoes, simply for the purpose of covering the parts of the body which cause shame.” Clothing for Buddha serves a utilitarian purpose; any additional flourish or accessory would be an indulgent display of vanity. One not need to be a strict Buddhist—to call for the complete negation of the self and all human wants— in order to sympathize with the approach. Insofar as fashion is an activity steeped in self-consciousness and anxiety, spiritual liberation might require an elimination of fashion. The individual uniform then becomes a tool for enlightenment.

The desire for approval is simply too strong. For example, although Zuckerberg claims to exist above fashion, his uniform is still intentional. He purposefully chose the grey t-shirt and jeans out of all other possible combinations of clothes because they create a persona—albeit, a persona defined by apathy. The plain, minimal outfit reinforces common perceptions programmers have of themselves—especially in Silicon Valley—as above petty concerns, instead focused on crafting the world in their own image.

Zuckerberg could have simply hired a personal stylist and similarly avoided “unnecessary” choice; instead, he actively created a personal uniform, coopting and reinforcing certain stereotypes about programmers.

Zuckerberg demonstrates that the two motivations for wearing an individual uniform often intersect, especially in the corporate world.

Given that fashion is omnipresent and infects every aspect of our waking lives, the problem of fashion is existential: the inability to properly express oneself creates anxiety and self-consciousness. The personal uniform solves this problem—for men, at least. At one level, the wearer uses the uniform to create a purposeful caricature—a personal brand; conversely, the uniform eliminates the desire for expression entirely. The boundary between these two motivations is permeable. If only we could return to a time of fig leaves.

leather that cover and shelter us; to represent is to reduce."

BILAL MEMON B’22 plans to live in a nudist colony.

+++ Despite the theoretical delineation between uniform as embrace of persona and as denial of expression, in practice the line between the two concepts often blurs.

Unless one is the Buddha, and has completely destroyed the ego, fashion is necessarily self-conscious, despite one’s purported goals or aspirations.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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RI Dual Language Education Symposium URI Providence Paff Auditorium (80 Washington Street) 8:30AM-12:30PM This symposium seeks to envision the future of dual-language education in Rhode Island. Unlike typical ESL instruction, which figures English competency as the preliminary goal of education, dual-language programs promote literacy via immersion—i.e., children learn math, language arts, science, and history in both English and another language (most commonly Spanish) alternatively throughout the school day. Pretty much all the research out there says that dual-language education is our best bet in remedying the achievement gap between native English speakers and Englishlanguage learners!

Massages & Martinis FrIdAys Askew Providence (150 Chestnut Street) 4-7PM $5 You can’t spell “sober” without “sore”! Way too beat from the workweek to explain why you should go to this event— which is just happy hour with on-premise masseuses—in greater detail.

Early Bird Bike Sale 1911 Westminster Street 10AM-3PM The early bird catches the bike chain! (But, unlike the worm of the original idiom, he doesn’t eat it—that’s a task for deceased French entertainer Monsieur Mangetout, who ate 18 bicycles and also an entire airplane over the course of his life.) Anyway, check out this sale and maybe come away from it with a non-electric, non-bike-share-related bicycle or bike part.

Hard to be a God FAV Auditorium Building, Room 330 (17 Canal Walk) 9PM-12AM Russian filmmaker Alexei German’s 2017 very beautiful sci-fi epic Hard To Be a God is a movie that’s been described to me as both “near-perfect” and “difficult to watch.” It follows a group of Soviet scientists who are sent to essentially colonize the planet Arkanar and assume God-like power over the local civilization, which is in its medieval phase. Required watching (as a form of re-education) for anyone who believes that history as such progresses forward.

The New England Saltwater Fishing Show Rhode Isl``and Convention Center (1 Sabin Street) 10AM-5PM Mark your g-cals and invest in a bucket of meal worms because New England’s largest saltwater fishing convention comes to town this weekend! Exhibitors from all over the country, representing nearly every major fishing tackle company, will grace the Ocean State with their rods, reels, lures, electronics, charter guides, boats, motors, accessories, and clothing.

Make Way for Gen Z Rhode Island College Student Union Ballroom (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue) 9:30-11:30AM Alternatively titled “Abolish Boomers” by no one other than me, this forum will focus on the motivations and challenges of Gen Z activism, and “how this affects Gen Z’s coming of age” (i.e. how a constant sense of encroaching disaster has destroyed any sense of our youth). Featuring students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as well as young organizers here in Providence.

Codify Roe in RI Lobby Day! Rhode Island State House (82 Smith Street) 3:30-5PM Earlier this month, the House passed the Reproductive Privacy Act, which protects reproductive health rights (including access to safe, legal abortion) as outlined in Roe v. Wade, but the bill has to pass in the Senate in order to reach the governor’s desk. Join Planned Providence Votes! RI in the State House lobby every Tuesday afternoon to help make sure that happens.

Freelancer Happy Hour Trinity Brewhouse (186 Fountain Street) 5-7PM ACES: The Society for Editing (professional association “of international scope” for copy editors) is hosting their annual conference in Providence this year, but the Indy was not invited, presumably because we are TYPO-LESS AND PERFECT! Anyways, the conference is $700 for nonmembers. Join us instead at this free(lancer) happy hour and see if, after putting back a few, these sticklers will let more than their Oxford commas slip.

The Nature of Things Book Club Providence Public Library (150 Empire Street) 7-8PM For March’s session of the PPL’s monthly reading group of eco-lit, try and cram Frans de Waal’s “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are.” If you do, though, you can bring in this discussion question on my behalf: if animals were so smart, wouldn’t they start their own damn book club?

Rhode Island Virtual Reality March Meetup 116 Chestnut Street 5:30-7:30PM RIVR is pairing up with Rhode Island Vegan Awareness this month to present you with a special treat: iAnimal, “UNIQUE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE INTO THE LIVES OF FARMED ANIMALS.” This is intended to make you more compassionate towards animals, but alternatively this could be an empowering way to simulate people looking at you like a tasty snacc from 360 degrees!