The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 2

05 projecting the second Latin Boom

07 rage against the machine

09 legalized sports betting at Twin Rivers

Volume 38 • Issue 02

February 08, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R n* A B row

D IS

ly Week

The Indy Contents Cover Remote Control Nicole Cochary

From The Editors

News 02 Week in Closing Time Grace Keefe & Wen Zhuang

Admittedly, I didn’t watch this year’s State of the Union. My philosophy on this event (in general) is that it’s a vulgar display of rhetoric; to quote a friend on Twitter, “dont care about the sotu, responses, or the united states.” Boringly, clips and quotes from Trump’s speech—as well as liberal and progressive responses to it—dominated my own Twitter feed on Wednesday morning. Here’s what I learned: guests included several vets tokenized for their injuries, a little boy named Josh Trump who purportedly gets bullied for his nominal likeness to 45, and a coalition of female Democratic reps dressed up in white pantsuits in a nod to early twentieth-century suffragette fashion. AOC grimaced for the entire address, whereas Nancy Pelosi clapped when Trump bragged that “America will never be a socialist country.”

03 Misreadings and Misgivings Oriana Van Praag Features 05 A Second Latin Boom Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña 13 What I Learned at Home Tara Sharma Science & Tech 07 The Ex-Machina Fallacy Griffin Kao

Fast forward to like, nine years from now: America is an anarcho-syndicalist utopia, money has been abolished, and the only federal holiday we still observe just so happens also called the State of the Union—a day when union leaders get together across the country and give local public lectures about the state of The Union as such! And, also, there’s no more Valentine’s Day.

Metro 09 All In Peder Schaefer, Deb Marini, & John Graves

- SS

12 Plugging the Drain Harry August

Mission Statement

Ephemera 11 Part 1: Insects Claire Schlaikjer & Nicole Cochary X 14 Let’s get into the water, friend!

Jorge Palacios & Alex Westfall

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.

Arts 15 “Solving” Translation Saanya Jain

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.

Literary 17 Manifesto Emma Kofman

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.

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 Eve Zelickson

08 FEB 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 02

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Straus Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana 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 Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

Katrina Northrop Chris Packs Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

*** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

BY Grace Keefe and Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION Halle Krieger DESIGN Katherine Sang and Bethany Hung

WEEK IN CLOSING TIME

Going O’Naturel Imagine this: a spacious, vibrant dining hall fills with an ensemble of chattering individuals in minimal dress. The guests, comfortable and composed, merrily toast each other and soak in the good company, their bare bodies mingling about in the relaxed atmosphere.

Surprisingly enough, I am not referring to Thomas Couture’s Romans During the Decadence, which currently hangs in the Musee d’Orsay, but rather to a real-life restaurant just a few metro stops away. It's just another night at O’Naturel, Paris’ first and only nudist restaurant. Since its official opening in 2017, O’Naturel has attracted waves of local diners and devoted tourists, all eager to ditch their pantsuits for their birthday suits before chowing down on regal spreads of duck foie gras and escargot. However, despite the establishment’s best efforts to put (bare) butts in seats, owners Stéphane and Mike Saada recently announced that they’ll be shutting down permanently due to “financial reasons.” This month, after just a year of hosting foodies who like to let it all hang out, O’Naturel is set to close its doors for good.

Fortunately for social nudist enthusiasts, O’Naturel’s brief standing among France’s finest eateries is by no means a sign of regression within the greater naturist movement. On the contrary, social naturism in Europe appears to be on the rise, which has resulted in a much broader clientele base within the otherwise uber-niche nudist industry. In France alone, reports from self-identified nudists have risen over fifty percent since 2014, and membership to the French Federation of Naturism exceeded 2.7 million this past year, more than enough people to fill the halls of a single nudist restaurant. It’s surprising, then, that even with the recent surge in nudist “buffs,” O’Naturel— five-star reviews and all—found itself struggling for business. C’est la vie.

Nevertheless, new nudist-friendly spaces continue to spring up across France. The Bois de Vincennes park in Paris recently set aside a generous portion of land for the naturist community in order to be more “openminded” towards its guests and their practices. It is precisely this abiding acceptance of unclothed expression that contemporary naturists so passionately strive towards. Historically, public nudity has been regarded as a socially unacceptable (sometimes even illegal) practice, and to this day, nudity is often considered synonymous with vulgarity and sexuality. According to naturists, however, going clothes-less is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, they argue that living a clothesfree lifestyle boosts people’s confidence and obscures typical indicators of socioeconomic status. In this way, by stripping down and hanging out in parks, restaurants, and wherever they’re welcome, naturists hope to shatter the stigma surrounding nudity and encourage

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

critic wrote. Turrell’s nebulous goal has always been to show us how to see. But as images like Caffrey’s surfaced this past weekend, something seemed awry: his sky had been cut through by cranes and scaffolding across the street. This obstruction, though more in line with the daily scenery of New Yorkers (when they do look up at all) was not what Turrell wanted us to see.

The sky as he knew it was broken, so he ordered a shutdown. By Monday, it was closed to the public.

At 76, Turrell’s popularity is unfettered, and currently fuels the long-time stand-off between rapper Drake and rapper-turned-cultural maverick Kanye West. This past December, West uploaded a screenshot of a phone call with Turrell, coming in at 3 minutes and 8 seconds. It sent social media into a frenzy, with media sites wondering about the implications of this “pointed flex” (towards Drake). Three years people to live life more freely—both in the figurative prior, Drake had debuted his music video for “Hotline and physical sense. In the context of a high-end dining Bling”—wondering why he left the city bathed in the establishment like O’Naturel, the naturist philos- light of Turrellian panels. The LA artist issued a forthophy makes a lot of sense: it allows diners to turn their coming statement upon realizing he’d been ripped off: attention away from the latest styles to focus more on “(I’m) truly flattered to learn that Drake f*cks with me.” enjoying the food and company. Even a first-timer at This past December, West gave Drake a literal O’Naturel expressed that, while dining bare, they were run for his money: while on an “art pilgrimage,” West “very comfortable and at no point [felt] awkward to be met and talked with Turrell, subsequently donating 10 naked.” That’s a mission accomplished in my book. million dollars to fund the artist's Roden Crater project While outdoor spaces have served as nudist sanc- which was first conceived in the 1970’s and has been tuaries for decades, indoor business ventures such as in progress since. Aside from the generous donation, O’Naturel and NaturistBnB, an alternative AirBnB the situation is not unique to Kanye—each year many site for the clothing-averse, are still an emerging trend. embark on “art pilgrimages” to immerse themselves in Like the Bois de Vincennes, these new establishments Turrell’s ouvre, usually large glistening, modular land hope to expand cultural opportunities for the naturist installations set on barren, imposed-upon lands. They community and normalize nudist practices within provide us with new, if idealistic, senses of perception. society. Indeed, O’Naturel itself was designed so This overarching philosophy—we cannot just look up that nudists of all levels could participate in everyday at the sky, we must look through Turrell’s geometric, acts, like eating dinner, without having to leave warmly colored vantage point—is not unlike that of their “natural” element. As is the case with any social his stalemate across the street. The construction that crusade, it’s difficult to judge what direction the social prompted Meeting’s shutdown comes from two resinaturist movement will move in next, and whether or dential towers being built to replace the former 5Pointz not the nudist restaurant industry will be revived. But graffiti mural space across the street. In 2013, an artist if naturism continues to grow at its current rate, we collective sued Jerry Wolkoff, the building’s owner could all find ourselves “feeling the breeze” just a bit turned developer, for whitewashing the walls overmore in the near future. night with plans to build luxury apartments. 5Pointz won that case but the plan has evidently been reupped: -GK Wolkoff issued a statement to MoMA Ps1 asserting that construction should be completed within six months, with the scaffolding in question to be moved by the Looking at you looking end of the week. The faster the luxury apartments rise up (and 5Pointz is chased out), the quicker artistically Last Sunday, Brooklynite Sean Caffrey announced inclined New Yorkers like Sean Caffrey can experito his 200 or so Twitter followers: “I feel like I broke ence Turrell's museum bunker and ponder about space, this story on my Instagram.” The attached image time, and existence. was of a squared-off piece of sky, obstructed in the If all goes as planned, Turrell’s Meeting will be corner by the tip of a construction crane, some scaf- on view before this issue of the Independent hits the folding, framed within two walls that glowed an eerie stands. Turrell’s artist statement asks: “what are you blue. “He’s closed it down.” The tweet understandably looking at?” To which he answers, “you are looking at caused panic—with the government newly reopened you looking.” If this is so, Meeting’s slight altercation after the longest federal shutdown in history, what in this past week might have been the most successful the world was he up to now?

Turrell piece yet, breaking the barriers between To the relief of many, he was not Trump and it was Turrell’s idealistic innerspace and our urban reality. not the government (again). But Caffrey’s breaking When we walk down the streets of New York, espenews was no less dystopic and shook the bedrock of a cially in Queens, we see iterations of Turrell’s quixotic system that is no less bureaucratic. The art world was vision everywhere. They block the sun and cut through thrust into a frenzy by the next week: famed light and community gardens—for the indefinite future, we are space artist James Turrell had ordered the shutdown barred from Turrell’s square-cut piece of sky, but rest of his Meeting installation at MoMA Ps1, a contempo- assured we are welcome to the rest of the blue expanse, rary art space in Queens. Meeting was one of the many obstructed or not.

Turrell ‘Skyspaces’ spread across the world as “specifically proportioned chambers with an aperture in the -WZ ceiling where visitors may view the sky.” The scenery is to be unperturbed, “dull but extraordinary” as one

NEWS

02

BY Oriana Van Praag ILLUSTRATION Katya Lebowe-Stoll DESIGN Bethany Hung

MISREADINGS AND MISGIVINGS

It was a sight to behold. On January 23, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets to denounce the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and demand a return to democracy. The streets of Caracas were filled with protesters chanting and waving the national flag, in an outpouring of hope that weeks before had seemed impossible.

The capital had become a site of mourning, fear, and desperation. Once teeming markets lay empty, and the little food that could be found seemed to increase in price by the minute. The country’s inflation rate surpassed 1.3 million percent last year, according to figures by the International Monetary Fund, and a household survey from 2017 found that 87 percent of the population lived in poverty and over 61 percent lived in extreme poverty. More people leave their homes every day to seek refuge in neighboring countries, and the ones who stay behind are generally afraid to go out due to rampant crime. But on that bright January morning, Venezuelans raised their hands to the sky as if to take an oath. They were swearing in Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly, as interim president.

This was a direct challenge to the Maduro regime, which had grown more authoritative as the popularity of the United Socialist Party decreased due to mounting social and economic crisis. The executive stacked the courts with loyalists and annulled the powers of the National Assembly, which the opposition had gained control over in 2015. Two years later, it held sham elections to a supra-constitutional body that assumed legislative authority. Despite the growing concentration of power in the executive, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) insisted on the electoral route to take back democratic spaces. That had been the preferred strategy of the coalition since its inception in 2008, and it allowed parties ranging from the Left to the Center-Right to come together at election time to oppose the ruling party.

In 2017, the MUD tried organizing a recall referendum and participating in gubernatorial elections, but the former was quickly halted by the regime and the latter were mired in fraud. The government made voting difficult for opposition supporters and coerced beneficiaries of social programs into voting in its favor, all the while forbidding independent oversight.

It became clear that participating in elections without ensuring fairness and transparency would only serve to legitimate the regime. Several negotiation processes were attempted, but the government was unwilling to make substantial concessions. With both the institutional and the electoral route blocked, it was difficult to see how the opposition could move forward. By the start of 2018, many of its leaders were imprisoned or in

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NEWS

exile, and it looked like the coalition was about to come apart.

When the government called presidential elections that May, the main parties in the opposition did not participate, as electoral conditions had not changed since the gubernatorial race. Still, Maduro announced that he had been reelected with almost 70 percent of the votes and a 46 percent participation rate. “So much they have underestimated me,” he said to a crowd of supporters, “and here we are again, victorious!” Only in the eyes of a few: the elections were widely perceived as a sham in Venezuela, with the United States, the European Union, and the Latin American countries gathered under the Lima Group refusing to recognize their results. Therefore, few cheered during the inauguration of his second presidential term this January, in a context where all institutional and electoral pathways were blocked. However, the event was also an opportunity because Maduro was not recognized as the country’s legitimate leader by a large portion of the international community; the stage was set for a challenger to rise. +++ Juan Guaidó, a young deputy who began his career as a student leader, was elected president of the National Assembly that month as part of a power-sharing agreement between the main opposition parties. Unlike most leaders in the coalition, he was not resented for the failures of previous years or under government persecution. His rise to the national stage reinvigorated opposition supporters: “People had lost faith,” a protester named María Amelia told The New York Times, “then a leader emerged, and this new leader has become our biggest hope.” Guaidó asked to be sworn in as interim president based on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, which establishes that the head of the National Assembly should assume power and hold new elections if the president-elect is determined to be absent. While winning through illegitimate elections is not one of the absences mentioned in the article, there are no constitutional provisions determining what to do in such a case, which means the National Assembly is allowed to make a liberal interpretation of the text. That being the only remaining democratic institution in the country, the leadership of Juan Guaidó has both legal and popular legitimacy.

“Let’s swear as brothers that we won’t rest until we gain freedom,” he told protesters on January 23, “we know that this is not just about one person.”

Yet international news outlets have insisted on portraying Guaidó as a political nobody who “declared himself” president. This portrayal places undue emphasis on his figure, neglecting that political power in the opposition is widely distributed, and it denies agency to the millions of Venezuelans who support him.

In some cases, these failures are part of a wider misunderstanding by international observers who see the

efforts toward democratic transition in the country as a coup d’état. Progressive outlets like Democracy Now! have reported that a coup is underway in Venezuela, and more mainstream publications like The New York Times have also expressed concern. They are worried about the role that the Venezuelan military and foreign governments, particularly the United States, would play in the process of governmental change. Both parties’ objectives seem antithetical to a peaceful and democratic transition, and they evoke a shameful past of international intervention and military dictatorship in Latin America. While there are grounds to be concerned, the fears of international observers tend to be exaggerated or misplaced, given their basis on simplified and frequently naïve understandings of the Venezuelan political context.

While it would be ideal for democratic transition to be carried out solely by civilians, the power of the military is inescapable. The armed forces have historically been the arbiters of political change in the country, and the current regime depends on them to remain in power. Maduro has secured the support of the military by offering generals top positions in his government and providing them with ample opportunities to engage in corruption. The upper ranks of the armed forces have not felt the humanitarian crisis that consumes most Venezuelans: they continue to reap the benefits of oil extraction, mineral exploitation, and the country’s swelling drug trade. In addition to giving them access to these state resources, the regime has used political repression to ensure their loyalty. In a process that began under Chávez and has grown severe in recent years, the armed forces have been purged of dissident officials, who have been either jailed or forced into exile.

However, coverage of the events in left-leaning news outlets seems to suggest that it is the opposition who relies on the military for support. They cite desperate protesters who want the army to topple Maduro or call on a strong government to restore law and order. To present these voices as representative of opposition supporters as a whole is inaccurate, and to conflate them with the political strategy of their leaders is misleading. Unlike top officials in the government, all opposition politicians are civilians. People in the opposition are generally apprehensive of the military because of its alliance with the government, and many of them have suffered at its hands: civil society organizations calculate that 200 people were killed in the protests of 2014 and 2017 and more than 20,000 were injured. In the past weeks alone, over 800 people have been jailed and 43 killed. Hence, the vast majority of people who desire change would not like to see a military government like the ones of last century, and they would generally prefer the armed forces to play a minor role in the transition.

However, Venezuelans do not have the intellectual privilege to ignore the capacity for violence that lies within the military. Maduro cannot be ousted and new presidential elections cannot be held unless the men in uniform allow it—so their allegiance has to be procured somehow. Guaidó acknowledges this: on January 27, he addressed soldiers asking them “not to shoot against the Venezuelan people” who have “constitutionally taken to the streets to defend your family, your people, your job, and your sustenance.”

The National Assembly subsequently passed a Law of Amnesty and Constitutional Guarantees targeted at military and government officials who support the transition to democracy. The middle and lower ranks

08 FEB 2019

Understanding the Venezuelan presidential crisis

may be receptive to the offer, as they are also facing dire circumstances, but their support will not result in governmental change unless there is a widespread insurrection or prominent members switch sides.

Some have already recognized Guaidó as president, including the government’s defense attaché in the United States and an Air Force general, but it remains to be seen whether others will follow their lead.

So, while the armed forces have an important role to play in the transition, they are not presently its mastermind or executioner. That does not mean military involvement is free of risk: the armed forces will most likely try to retain influence over the state and maintain access to its resources, and they may even attempt to put one of their own in power. This means the opposition will have to tread carefully while seeking their support. However, its leadership has consistently demonstrated that it desires a peaceful transition, led by civilians. +++ Many international observers worry that this possibility would be hindered by foreign intervention. They were suspicious when Guaidó was recognized as interim president by the majority of Latin American countries, the European Union, and the United States.

To them, that support indicates that the movement for government change responds to the economic and political interests of foreign countries, and some have gone as far as to say their administrations have orchestrated it. These accounts, like those concerned with the participation of the military, tend to ignore the political agency and popular legitimacy of the opposition and fail to recognize that international pressure has an important role to play in the transition to democracy.

Encouraging foreign governments to pressure Maduro is one of the few ways the opposition can procure the political leverage needed for negotiations.

The few state institutions it still controls have little to no effective power, and its leaders command limited economic means. However, they have something the regime does not: international legitimacy. Up until now, that recognition has provided little more than symbolic standing and calls for the government to respect human rights and democracy, which have not been conducive to regime change. The stronger stance assumed by foreign governments in Europe and the Americas this past month should not be read as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. Instead, it should be understood as a manifestation of the responsibility the international community bears toward people whose rights are being violated by an oppressive regime. It is foreign governments who are responding to the demands of Venezuelans and their representatives, and not vice versa.

Yet many observers are concerned that the governments pressuring Maduro are responsible for economically and socially conservative reforms in their own countries, and that some are themselves authoritarian.

The most powerful states in the Americas have shifted towards the right in recent years, with Trump coming to power in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Piñera and Macri in Chile and Argentina, respectively. Whether or not the opposition agrees with the domestic policies of these governments, however, it finds itself in an international context where it must make strategic alliances.

The most influential of those alliances has been with the United States. This is the main qualm raised

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by observers who are sympathetic to the plight of Venezuelans but apprehensive of American intervention abroad. They are right to be suspicious: Washington is responsible for the installation of military dictatorships in Latin America that have resulted in ineffable suffering, such as those that deposed João Goulart in Brazil and Salvador Allende in Chile.

And the Trump administration’s discourse around Venezuela, while clothed in democratic language, is indicative of a wider project to restore American dominance in the region. In a speech before the UN General Assembly last September, Trump drew on the Venezuelan crisis to argue that “virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried, it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay” and call on “all nations of the world [to] resist socialism.” The promotion of American supremacy through Cold War rhetoric was even clearer in the statements of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before the UN Security Council this January. He urged member states to “pick a side ... either you stand with the forces of freedom or you’re in league with Maduro and his mayhem.”

The United States has broken diplomatic relations with the regime and recognized Guaidó as its legitimate interlocutor in the country. On January 28, the administration imposed oil sanctions prohibiting most American businesses from engaging in transactions with the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA. Officials say these penalties could block up to $7 billion in assets and result in $11 billion export losses over the next year, starving the regime from its most important source of revenue and foreign currency. The American government had shied away from such broad economic sanctions in the past, fearful that they would aggravate the humanitarian crisis in the country as they did in countries like Cuba and Iran. For the most part, its sanctions toward Venezuela have been targeted at officials accused of human rights abuses, corruption, or drug trafficking. But while those penalties have hurt individuals, they have so far failed to generate a transition. Oil sanctions may be needed to trigger negotiations or allow for the establishment of an interim government, but they also risk making the regime more aggressive. Geoff Ramsey, an analyst at the Washington Office in Latin America, told CNN that the sanctions constitute a huge gamble: “We know for certain that this will have an impact on the Venezuelan people, who are already struggling with an economic crisis. What we don’t know is whether this will for sure lead to some kind of restoration of democracy.”

In addition to barring transactions between American enterprises and PDVSA, the sanctions prevent the Venezuelan government from accessing refineries in the United States operated by subsidiary CITGO. The Trump administration has ordered the company to divert its payments for Venezuelan crude into a blocked bank account from which only Guaidó

will be able to draw funds. Additionally, it has offered him $20 million in humanitarian aid. Providing the opposition with access to these resources could help it garner support: the interim president told The Washington Post that aid would pose a “new dilemma for the regime and the armed forces. They’ll have to decide if they’re on the side of the people and want to heal the country, or if they will ignore it. I believe we’re going to achieve it. They’re going to let it in.” The first shipment of medical supplies arrived at the Colombian border on February 6, but it has not yet been allowed to cross over into Venezuela.

Economic and diplomatic pressure by the United States has raised the stakes in the Venezuelan crisis, putting the government on the defensive and increasing the leverage of the opposition. While it is possible that will facilitate democratic transition, it carries enormous risks. By assuming a leading role, the Trump administration is alienating actors at home and abroad who oppose his policies and want the United States to stay out of the process. The measures taken by his government are clearly not selfless—they respond to an interest to access the country’s natural resources and establish allied governments in the region. The humanitarian aid provided to the opposition comes with strings attached, committing succeeding governments to implement policies amicable to the United States. It is also uncertain whether the Trump administration will limit itself to economic and diplomatic measures or end up pursuing military action. Last year, a report by The New York Times revealed that members of his government had met with a dissident group in the Venezuelan military planning a coup d’état but ultimately decided not to support them. These past weeks government officials have insisted that “all options are on the table.” +++ There is no guarantee that a military coup would lead to the establishment of a democratic government, and an international invasion would be a catastrophe. If the opposition desires a peaceful solution to the crisis, led by Venezuelan civilians, it must carefully weigh its alliances to the armed forces and foreign governments and avoid becoming a player in a game it cannot control. No transition will be perfect— concessions will have to be made­— but the leadership must be the one to set the terms of engagement and avoid commitments that may compromise the people’s right to self-determination. For many Venezuelans today, the future looks brighter than it has for a long time, but darkness looms next door.

ORIANA VAN PRAAG B’19.5 has a complicated relationship to hope.

NEWS

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A SECOND LATIN BOOM Sometime in the mid 20th century, a series of novels in translation about the Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s microcosm of the South, found its way into the hands of Gabriel García Márquez. At the time, the reporter would have been colloquially referred to as El Gabo. In Yoknapatawpha County, El Gabo saw a window into Latin America. Faulkner had painted an American South with fears of incest, the veneration of disgraced commanders, spirituality, and grotesque inequality that Márquez found in rural Latin American towns like his own in Colombia. He would create his own microcosm called Macondo in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The opus now has sold over 50 million copies in 37 languages (it’s said that when the book was translated to Russian, their publishers had to cut down a whole forest in order to keep up with the demand for the book). +++ Currently, there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the United States and 11 million bilingual speakers; according to Spanish Language Domains (SLD), the US falls just under Mexico, with 104 million speakers.

The language has traveled into the US through many pathways and for various reasons. The presence of Spanish speakers, most hailing from Latin America or with ancestors from Latin America, is unquestionably significant in US demographics. Currently 17.6 percent of the population is Hispanic; according to a 2017 Pew research study, by 2050 that figure is estimated to grow to 30 percent. In contrast to the shrinking youth population (ages 0-18) in the United States, the Hispanic youth population remains vibrant with a predicted 22 percent increase in the Hispanic youth population.

The growing youth population is bound to spark new energy into an evolving Latino identity and into the Spanish language. There are historical precedents to these movements: this population’s linguistic inheritance within the volatile context of contemporary United States in an age of greater interconnectivity has the potential for an unbinding experimentation, one that could mirror that of the Latin Boom, which arose in the 1960s.

During that time, the world was observing a deep unrest taking place in Latin America: Fidel Castro led a communist Cuba that would eventually send the United States into a panic; Pinochet overthrew the democratic elected leader in Chile to mark the beginning of many human rights violations; authoritarian governments backed by their militaries took over in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and other countries in Latin America; the United States fueled the dirty war that would devastate Argentina; and the student protests that took place 10 days before the Mexico City Olympics would conclude with the Tlatelolco massacre. As more people sought to make sense of the events occuring in the Global South, many looked to the authors of the region for guidance. +++ Working on the foundations of a previous generation of Latin American writers, this new generation of authors of the Boom found inspiration in the work of English and American modernists who were experimenting with new narratives and styles. Through language, these Latin American writers continued to experiment

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FEATURES

with subtleties and ambiguities in order to comment on megalomaniacal dictatorships and deflect suffocating US interventions. During a time when the world's eyes were on Latin America, Juilo Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Marquéz found international commercial success and exploded to global stardom. With the advent of television broadcasts throughout most of Latin America in the mid-50’s, both its citizens and the rest of the world were able to see the ailments of the region in sound, image, and real-time. The events were occuring seemingly without rhyme or reason, a sentiment that had to be matched with a radical, specifically Latin American narrative and linguistic style in order to convey a truth in a time of spin—one that the Boom authors presented.

Whether as journalists, politicians, activists or exiles of their countries, the big four of the Latin Boom were entrenched in the political sphere of the time.

The worldwide publicization of the events coupled with the writers’ more intimate critical relationships with them allowed for the creation of the style typically felt throughout Latin Boom novels: non-linear timelines, cross-cutting narratives, and rotating characters produce a state of mind one might inhabit while flipping through various different channels. In turn, they creating a narrative of Latin America that is complete in its disjointedness. In one particularly famous novel of that time, Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar begins with: “In its own way, this book consists of many books.” Hopscotch uses an arbitrary sequencing of chapters that may inspire each reader to choose their own narrative order. And while the inundation of new information about Latin America entered the newscycle everyday, the specific emphasis placed on the relationship between time and narration from the Boom authors also mirrored the complex digestion of history and its repetitions. +++ The unrest of the 70s seems to follow the current Latin American diaspora. Undocumented migrant workers are often blamed for stealing jobs reserved for the “untouchables,” a group of people that are not given legal protection for their labor. Industries— agriculture, meat packing, supermarkets— often rely on this labor to turn a profit and keep prices low for Americans. The political narrative plays Latino men as macho rapists and drug dealers, and saves space to essentialize and

BY Eduardo Guitérrez Peña ILLUSTRATION James Gatley DESIGN Bethany Hung

exotify Latina women. A hurricane can hit Puerto Rico, a part of the United States, and they will not be helped because the majority speaks Spanish, furthering the President’s suspicion of the language and its speakers.

Latinos navigate a web tense with thousands of contradictory strands; at the core are attacks on identity and personhood. Latinos in the US are always a stone’s throw from living their lives unbothered: a familiar phone conversation might involve being informed that one’s aunt was brought to a detention center after being tracked and left waiting in the desert, or that their father was stopped by Immigration on his way back from the landscaping a lawn because the neighbors heard him talking in Spanish. Being a Latino born in the US means being constantly met with an onslaught of devastating information that is combated with a straight countenance at the dinner table in an attempt to spare our parent’s sanity and optimism towards the American dream. On top of these forces, LatinAmericans face judgement from native Latinos for not knowing Spanish perfectly or not fitting into hegemonic gender and sexual identities. These realities can make Latin-Americans feel both split between and excluded from two worlds. And yet Latin-Americans have to traverse and translate these worlds everyday, between tradition and progressiveness, between being the protected and the protector—a placelessness with no destination.

Consciously or not, the youth are sponges. The words that the Latino-American youth share are unlike any other: not only do they witness the Spanish language, they have personal ties with migrationspeak, strawberrypickingnese, exploitationtalk, and on top of that, almost all of them know English. And even knowing all of these languages, US government agencies paint a fictional story to immigrant parents, telling them that their children have language gaps and have to be put through programs with no respect for their cultural linguistic acquisition. The multiple languages that young Latino-American youth are playing with will be essential for the expression of their identities.

While many Spanish-speakers look down on the Anglicisms in Puerto Rican Spanish, they reflect a change happening for many Spanish-speakers in the United States. Whereas before, it was a norm to only code-switch to English when around white, non-Latinos, Spanish-Americans have created a Spanish that creatively code-mixes to recall cultural nomenclature that might not exist in one language or another. Code-mixing is a phenomenon that allows a speaker to shift languages mid sentence or even midword, which opens new possibilities for an expression that is deeply aware of its culture. Successful code-mixing requires a deep understanding of how different languages and the cultures attached to them.

Code-mixing, or “Spanglish,” do not indicate a failure of fluency in either language; rather, it is a new way

"The next great largescale linguistic artistic movement is brewing right here in the United States, and no one knows when it’ll blow, or even what language it will be in."

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Echoes and potential in a new aesthetic movement

of speaking for people who traipse on the linguistic and cultural tightrope—a mass exploration of a new language full of creative potential.

With the aid of the internet, a new language is being built to show the voice of a new Latino identity, without permission from any one linguistic institution.

The need for voices to represent this new Latin identity and the creative force behind it is evident in the rising popularity of Spanish music in the United States. Just last year Cardi B’s embraced her Latina identity on her album with hit songs with Spanish verses, and Drake, learned Spanish for a verse on Bad Bunny’s MIA. (Bad Bunny is a musician that regularly code-mixes to keep his flows unique.) More up-and-coming artists are playing with code-mixing, and the rise in popularity of these artists shows that there is an audience and commercial viability for doing so. +++ The term Latinx is a North American creation, a space for non-binary Latin Americans in a completely gendered language. The word was thought of and spread through Spanish-speaking queer blogs to include a population whose identities were linguistically erased. The power of the term is that it cements an identity that can collect agency. The word is creative in the Spanish language because it dodges the conventional gendering of words, but is a creative English word because the specific construction forces the visibility of intersectionality missing in most identity discussions. While many Spanish scholars feel

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the ‘estadounidismo’ is disrespectful to the Spanish language, claiming a deformation of the language, a single entity could not make claims on correct Spanish or control a language imposed upon entire ethnic groups 500 years ago. Language has always been used to meet the needs of its speaker and to represent them, and the acceptance of an institution has never mattered in terms of how language progresses. While Latinx may be polarizing in the Spanish speaking community, it will be cemented into the language of a new generation as more and more people utilize it.

Code-mixing evolves initially through spoken language and in recent years, has appeared on the internet, fueling the coinage of new terms like Latinx; the dissemination of language online helps to create and propagate new innovations in narration and style where code-mixing is normalized. Only with the confident code-mixing of millions of people as a foundation, is any book with spanglish words written by Junot Díaz allowed to sell a single copy, much less millions.

Only through the striving use of the term Latinx on social media and in dialogues about intersectionality at institutions can the term persist and find its way into everyday conversation. +++

of the Latin Boom juxtaposed the chaos and multiple narratives found on television with both the memory of tangential stories their grandmas told and their study of other authorts to form their narrative structure. While they were tasked with describing the identity of Latin America and Latin Americans to the rest of the world, Latinos in the United States may now be learning how to do the same. The identities of Latinos in the United States are being shaped by information, opinions, and hot-takes on the internet at a million miles-per-hour, most usually by people who have no stake in those identities. A new structure for telling these narratives is required to appropriately describe how it feels to be a Latino from the United States today.

Just as with the Latin Boom, when new problems arise, new language styles have to be created in order to express a new truth. The injustices that many American Latinos face can not be neatly solved with the linguistic logic of the past. The young adopters of these languages are still experimenting in the quest to express their truth amidst attacks on identity. And while many Latinos born in the United States are not learning Spanish, most are being raised hearing and feeling Spanish and stepping out their door into an English world. Children of immigrants in the United States can relate to the constant changes they have to make in order to fit into any culture. This population spends every day living through constant translation of cultures, which translation in itself is an exercise that, to quote (or translate) the great Jorge Luis Borges, “is an endless cycle of infinite possibilities.”

The next great large-scale linguistic artistic movement is brewing right here in the United States, and no one knows when it’ll blow, or even what language it will be in.

The emerging linguistic and cultural changes occuring serve as the basis for understanding the current LatinoAmerican narrative. Just as the modernists inspired the Latin Boom authors to write about the identity of the region, the current United States Latino artists will give a better framework for understanding the United States Latino identity. However, the true magic of the Latin Boom was not in writing a historical dictation of the region’s identity, but rather in creating styles and narrative structures that made you feel what it was EDUARDO GUTIÉRREZ PEÑA B'21 wrote this as a like to be a part of the region at the time. The authors love letter.

FEATURES

06

THE EX-MACHINA FALLACY How randomness separates us from AI

The screen lights up with a new text message from the threshold for intelligent behavior equivalent to and Scott, a professor at the University of Texas: How many indistinguishable from that of a human, the Turing legs does a camel have? test is comprised of a human evaluator trying to identify the machine in a natural language conversation Eugene types back: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, between human and computer. So the judges here three? :-))) By the way, I still don’t know your specialty. know that either Scott or Eugene must not be who they say they are. As it turns out, it’s Eugene Goostman who His smiley face seems to suggest that like other 13-year- isn’t human, but rather a chatbot programmed by three olds, he’s playful and maybe just a little bit childish. Russian computer scientists, and he manages to fool a But in any case, it doesn’t seem like his response is a third of the judges. Surpassing the required 30 percent serious attempt to answer the question. All business, to “pass” the Turing test, he becomes the first program Scott pointedly ignores the light-hearted response: to ever do so—a milestone indicative of the lengthy How many legs does a millipede have? strides scientists have made in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past few decades.

Again, Eugene doesn’t give an accurate answer and The intelligence Eugene exhibits hints at a future seems to get a little distracted: Just two, but Chernobyl in which machines and humans can be completely mutants may have up to five. I know you are supposed to identical—at least from the outside. This is a terrifying trick me. thought. If machines are just as creative and insightful as us, it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelliReading these messages, the judges of the 2014 Turing gence renders humans as obsolete as the last generatest competition are perplexed by the bizarre yet tion of iPhones. In fact, the Weak AI Hypothesis, which entirely intelligible conversation. Long thought to be states that a computer program can be built to act as

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“intelligently” as people, is held to be true by nearly every computer scientist working in the field of AI. And this seems to make perfect sense in a world where Eugene texts like a normal 13-year-old boy and other programs, like Google’s AutoML software, which can actually teach itself to program other machine learning software, can accomplish tasks most people can’t even complete. +++ In 1980, philosopher John Searle proposed an argument that directly disproved that the Turing test can be used to determine whether machines can think.

Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment begins with a hypothetical premise: a person who has no understanding of the Chinese language sits in a closed room. In the room is a book that details how to respond to each and every sequence of Chinese characters with an appropriate, corresponding sequence of Chinese characters. Using these instructions, when Chinese text is passed through a slot in the door, the person

08 FEB 2019

BY Griffin Kao ILLUSTRATION Julia Illana DESIGN Amos Jackson

inside the room can respond to the text in a way that gives the appearance of understanding to someone outside the room.

Searle claims that there is essentially no difference between this room and the way an intelligent computer works. In both cases, the agent simply follows stepby-step instructions to produce behavior that is then interpreted as intelligent by an external user. And in both cases, Searle contends that we cannot determine a single step in this process where someone or something understands what’s being said or what’s being inputted. Conversely, considering the way you think, you might find that when someone says something to you, you convert their speech into an inexpressible “language” that constitutes comprehension before outputting a response. If someone asks you, “What’s the weather like today?”, you would first process their question to understand it. And since you understand it, the question might set off a chain of thoughts like, I was sweating so much on that run which means it was really hot…oh my god, you know what else is hot…those flamin’ hot Doritos I tried today, which then leads to a spoken response.

Searle’s thought experiment doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that machines can simulate human intelligence since it only disproves that machines think like humans. However, the true understanding he points out may have implications for whether we can build a machine that is functionally the same as a human or if that understanding manifests itself as an insurmountable distinction between human and machine behavior. When we look at specific tasks, like speech recognition or speech generation, we see from qualitative analyses like the Turing test that machine behavior can be identical to human behavior. For example, you and Siri might both respond with “warm” to the question, “What’s the weather like today,” although you would have arrived at the response in different ways.

More generally and abstractly, what happens when we examine behavior across a wide variety of circumstances? If we monitored the responses of machines and humans to that same weather question on a thousand different days, and then tried to predict what each would answer the next day, it’s possible that we would be less accurate in making predictions for the human.

It’s possible the human might surprise us and say, “Why do you keep asking me this question?” after giving us reasonable answers every day before. In this case, we would find that the true understanding separating us from machines may result in a degree of randomness in human behavior that can never be matched by machines. Scientists cannot program into our intelligent systems this unattainable threshold of stochasticity, or randomness. In light of how often computer scientists take the Weak AI Hypothesis for granted, this may seem preposterous. But no real randomness exists in the way our computers operate, which, in conjunction with the possibility of some randomness in human behavior, provides strong evidence against the idea that machines can act exactly like humans.

+++

functionality to generate “random” numbers, but these number generators are actually classified as “pseudo-random” because they only appear to be random.

In fact, they’ve been heavily documented as deterministic, which means a given sequence of numbers can always be reproduced at a later time if the starting point of the sequence is known. Even true random number generators (TRNG)­—programs that generate random numbers from a physical process rather than from an algorithm—give the closest approximation to randomness that we can find in computers, but are still not actually random. Since such devices often utilize microscopic phenomena (like radioactive decay, thermal noise, or the photoelectric effect) in their environment to produce “randomness,” their behavior is technically deterministic. For example, one TRNG chooses a number based on the unpredictable halflife of the element Americium 241, which means the outputted number can be attributed entirely to environmental input. More generally, computer output is always predictable because a program always acts according to a set of strictly defined principles, much like the Chinese interpretation book in Searle’s thought experiment.

Ultimately, this means computers will never generate new ideas. They will never be able to paint a masterpiece or write a novel in their own style. Instead, they are relegated to warping input to produce seemingly original work. Indeed, generative adversarial networks (GANs), which represent the cutting edge of deep learning, do exactly that; GANs are trained to produce ‘new’ instances of a given data type, most commonly an image. These new instances are actually just the reshaped versions of their quasi-random inputs.

For instance, a GAN might produce a picture of a face if someone gives it the number four, whereas a human could draw a face without being given that number.

Unlike the determinism of computers, stochasticity in human behavior is harder to prove. It may seem easy to conflate randomness in human behavior with the idea of free will, but that remains a tangential issue, because ultimately, randomness does not necessarily imply choice. We can actually derive some of the randomness in our actions from biological processes; there is a significant body of scientific evidence which supports stochasticity at the molecular biological level.

French genetics expert Thomas Heams, for one, has detailed examples of random biological phenomena like DNA mutation and gametogenesis (the cell division by sex cells). Further yet, randomness in biology has been repeatedly linked to human resilience, asserting that the phenotype variability—or variability in our observable characteristics—that creates diversity stems from stochastic gene expression. This means it’s possible that personality traits, like your sense of humor or your affinity for English, may be partially the result of the genes you were given. And genetic randomness may result in randomness in personality that allows us to develop new qualities that, in turn, allow us to adapt to changing circumstances.

Let’s place this randomness in the context of our earlier examination of how we engage in conversation.

After listening to someone ask you about the weather and distilling the meaning of their question, you make In most programming languages, we can use built-in the decision of how exactly to respond. It’s this decision

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that is so influenced by your personality, which may be the product, at least in part, of stochastic genetic composition. This process of human conversation is again in contrast to the purely deterministic input and output of AI. Since scientists cannot program that randomness, humans cannot create machines that act just like people. +++ I’m scared of a future in which the very systems we’ve programmed replace us in shaping the world. I envision computers making vital decisions for us at the top, like whether we choose to abandon Earth to global warming or find a new planet, as well as smaller, day-to-day decisions at the bottom, like who to have lunch with on a given day. I fear that if we have machines smart enough to do the decision-making for us, our collective laziness will make it too tempting to give up our autonomy and take the back seat. I study computer science with a particular interest in artificial intelligence—and it’s the confluence of bright minds in the field working to make our robots smarter that reminds me of this dystopian vision. But as I dive further into the field of AI, I’m also simultaneously reassured against that possibility by the knowledge of how we design our intelligent systems.

While this isn’t a fear that grips the entire AI community, many experts do spend a lot of time contemplating the philosophy of AI. Dr. Bram van Heuveln is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who has published a number of papers on the subject. When asked about the Weak AI Hypothesis, he emphatically told the College Hill Independent, “If you didn’t believe in the Weak AI Hypothesis, you wouldn’t be in the field of AI.” But later, he said that the most crucial question in examining the Weak AI Hypothesis is whether “we can capture the relevant properties that our brains are implementing.” Relevance is subjective, but I presume he means properties that are true of human behavior. Dr. Heuveln, among other computer scientists, points to evaluations like the Turing test, which compare human and machine behavior on specific tasks, as evidence that we can program computers to behave like humans. Yet all of these evaluations would, again, fail to capture general stochasticity and do not provide conclusive evidence that we can create machines that perfectly simulate human behavior.

The idea that someone can have an entirely original thought, one whose origin cannot be traced in any way to an environmental factor, but rather an intangible consciousness or their genetic makeup, is inspiring. It means that humans are genuinely creative, a message of human triumph that implies a future in which, by some means, we adapt and overcome critical global issues like climate change and poverty with more innovative solutions. And it also means that no matter how technologically advanced our society becomes, no matter how many smart people there are working to improve artificial intelligence, programs like Eugene will never be able to speak for us.

GRIFFIN KAO B’20 likes people more than robots.

SCIENCE + TECH

08

ALL IN

Rhode Island legalizes sports betting

BY Peder Schaefer, Deb Marini, and John Graves ILLUSTRATION Bella Carlos DESIGN Katherine Sang

Ronny first came to what is now Twin Rivers Casino in Lincoln, RI—then a race track called Lincoln Downs— when he was nine years old to bet on horses with his dad. He came a lot when he was younger, and now that he’s a 59 year-old retired painter he comes more.

Ronny arrives at Twin Rivers every day around 11 a.m. and leaves close to midnight. Except on Tuesday. The horses don’t run on Tuesday. “Gamblers are funny,” he said, fidgeting with his glasses. “They don’t care about the atmosphere.”

The room is massive, yet there is enough smoke to slightly obscure the small television just inches away from his face, necessitating the black floral glasses he keeps placing and replacing on the tip of his nose. The scene is dominated by stadium-styled rows of personal desks, each outfitted with a small television screen (tuneable to any sports broadcast or horse race), a cushioned chair, and an ashtray. Ronny sits in the second row of this colosseum, second seat from the right surrounded by a spread of racing programs and old food wrappers.

Like most gamblers, he’s pretty consistent with his regimen—he sits in the same seat with the same people to do the same thing every day. But with Twin River’s new Sportsbook Bar and Grill opening last November, he’s begun trying his hand at sports betting too. +++ Ronny is one of thousands of people who have been drawn into Governor Gina Raimondo’s newest budget-padding strategy: government-syndicated sports betting, in which 51 percent of any of the casino’s sports betting-generated profits goes straight to the state’s General Fund, which helps fund human services, education, and general government expenses throughout the state.

Rhode Island was quick to legalize this form of wagering following the 2018 United States Supreme Court ruling that gave states the option to do so. Rhode Island, one of eight states that has legalized sports betting so far, is currently the only New England state to have done so, a magnetizing prospect for gamblers in nearby states, especially Massachusetts. This exodus of bettors across state lines has motivated the Bay State to move toward legalization as well, which would drain the crowds from Rhode Island’s two sportsbook facilities.

In a little over two months since the Sportsbook’s November opening, Rhode Island’s General Fund has earned around $500,000 from revenue gained through bets placed on sporting events at Lincoln’s Twin Rivers Casino and its sister casino in Tiverton.

The Governor’s budget initially projected that sports betting would produce $23.5 million in added revenue for the state in fiscal year 2019. But the Revenue Estimating Conference, a public economic forecaster in the state of Rhode Island, more than halved that estimate to around $11 million after computer and

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regulation issues delayed the grand opening of the Sportsbook by over four months. However, with the Patriots winning the Super Bowl last week, and hordes of loyal New Englanders placing bets on their local team, the casino lost roughly $2.3 million—wiping out all profits they’ve made so far, according to a spokesman from the Department of Revenue. The state’s December revenue was already behind projections, and last week’s losses even further jeopardize the state’s chance of hitting their profit goals from sports betting.

Regardless of revenue created, the questionable ethics of using an expanded state-endorsed gambling apparatus to help fund the state budget looms.

“Gambling is not a positive revenue source,” one patron at Twin River who requested anonymity, told the College Hill Independent. “It’s taking from people losing.”

According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, one percent of Americans are estimated to meet criteria for pathological gambling and another two to three percent are problem gamblers. The Rhode Island Lottery has programs in place to help those with a gambling problem, such as helplines and self-exclusion plans—­­­­­­­­­­­­but­ funding for the services are second rate, ranking 25th out of the 50 states in per capita funding, despite Rhode Island earning the most revenue per capita nationwide from gambling sources.

“Is this stuff really helping society? I don’t think so,” the patron continued. “It masks problems.”

As the state struggles to fund crucial services, the 51 percent cut is a win for the budget and, more broadly, the people of Rhode Island. But when you follow the money back to Twin River, a question of conflict of interest arises: is it improper, or even immoral, for the state to bankroll its services on an addictive vice?

a single game, and will sometimes wager as much as $5,000. He declined to give a last name out of fear that his girlfriend would discover his secret forays into the gambling world. “I’ve lost more than I’ve won,” he said indifferently, glancing up at the University of Minnesota basketball game as he spoke,“but I’m doing a lot better now with this guy.”

“This guy” is a Californian man who reached out to Billy over Instagram a few months ago. Now, for $60 a month, he sends Billy daily picks for key games. “He helped me win 3k last week, and if Minnesota wins [tonight], I’m going to hit for like $300,” he said, again looking up to see the Golden Gophers' progress on television number 22.

About twenty feet away, sitting on a stool overlooking the main floor of the Sportsbook, was Ozan Adiguzel, a senior at Brown University who studies statistics. Adiguzel is from Turkey, where sports betting has been legalized for years. He said the system in Rhode Island has a long way to go before it can rival European institutions. “In Europe these things are much more organized,” Adiguzel told the Indy. “You can bet through apps…there are kiosks and stores that are much more friendly.”

Young, with a scruffy beard and round, metalrimmed glasses, Adiguzel stands out from the rest of the bettors, who are mostly older men wearing sports jerseys. He is going to work for the Sacramento Kings basketball team as a data analyst next summer. After looking at some stats, he ended up placing $160 in bets, including $100 on the Houston Rockets game. “I’ve been working at sports betting for a long time,” said Adiguzel. “It’s also fun. When you bet on a game, then it’s much better to watch the game… It’s exciting. There are studies about it, betting. It makes you have more dopamine.” Adiguzel represents one side of the sports betting dichotomy: he chooses to bet for fun, while +++ others, riddled with addiction, have no choice.

Televisions flashed games and highlights. Waiters The Sportsbook Bar and Grill lies deep in the heart of took orders and patrons formed lines to place bets.

Twin Rivers, past the din of slot machine sirens and Adiguzel looked over it all. “I was thinking of doing the crackling of poker chips, and down a long hallway. some homework here actually,” he said.

High walls of televisions—each a window to a bright, lively sporting event—enclose a dozen-or-so patrons, +++ some watching the Sunday night games with fervent excitement, others watching with the apathetic glaze Standing at the end of the line at the Sportsbook Bar of mundane routine. Two men sit hunched about a and Grill, Brian Warwick waited to place his bet. The plate of solidifying nachos, occasionally mumbling line wasn’t too long, maybe ten people deep, but that’s to one another in reference to one of the many LED not always the case. “You come down here in the mornscreens. ings and the lines are out the door.”

One of the two, Billy, 30, of East Providence, comes Warwick is 57 and lives with his wife and two to Rhode Island’s Twin River Casino three times a kids near Boston. He’s a friendly, talkative guy in a week to partake in its new sports betting facility, but blue jacket who loves reminiscing about past bets has been involved in illegal online gambling for much and discussing his kids. He helps coach his daughlonger. “I’ve been betting for four years,” he told the ter’s basketball team and works the book at the school Indy. “A lot of people do it on the black market. This games. “I like numbers, so I enjoy helping out,” he [legalization of sports betting] cleans up everything explained. Each week he makes the hour commute without people getting beat up for not paying.” to the Sportsbook to place his bets. “I’ve been pretty Billy never bets less than a hundred dollars on successful. I haven’t had a week where I didn’t win at

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least one ticket, so I’ve at least broke even.”

Placing a bet is not as simple as just picking the winning team. The casino analyzes the game and creates a betting line based on their own projected outcome. For example, if Twin River believes that the Celtics are five points better than their opponent, they would assign a line of “BOS -5” for the game. Then the bet would need to be placed based on whether the bettor thought Boston would win by more or less than five points. Bets can also be placed specifically on whether a not a team wins a game, but the payout is dependent on which team is favored to win and by how much. Essentially, to make a profit, bettors need to be better than the casino at projecting the outcome of games.

A huge basketball fan, Warwick’s favors large parlays, the combination of many wagers into a single bet, which allows you to earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars despite risking only a small amount of money. Each additional wager roughly doubles your potential return on investment, so the possible earnings can grow quickly. These bets are riskier, though, because if even one of the wagers fail, you don’t win any money.

Warwick has had some close calls on parlay tickets.

“Recently, I won this ticket where I needed Cleveland to lose by less than nine points,” he said. “They were down by nine with two seconds to go, and there was a last second three pointer which brought them to within six.” Another time, he came up nine points shy in one game of winning $4000 on a $25 parlay. “I woke up at 3 A.M. to check it because I was that excited.”

Warwick thinks of sports betting as more than just a wager placed on one team or another. To him, it is a way to both enjoy and to think critically about the game in a way that is very different from other types of gambling. “See, out there [in the casino], you hit the slot and get lucky and win $15,000 or whatever. That’s all chance. For this you need luck too, like the three pointer at the buzzer the other night, but you do need to have strategy. And it's rewarding when you get a good chunk of cash back and you’re the one who made the pitch.” +++ Elsewhere in Twin River, the “Club 100” room is dark and drab. There are no windows, and the carpet is a shade of deep maroon. A flashy chandelier hangs over a big, rectangular table. Music and the tinny pop pop pop of slot machines drifts in through the closed wooden doors.

Club 100, located near the north entrance of the casino, was the location of last week’s General Assembly’s Permanent Joint Committee on State Lottery meeting. A bipartisan collection of lawmakers from Rhode Island’s Senate and House of Representatives, the committee takes turns meeting at the State House, the Rhode Island Lottery headquarters in Cranston, and at Twin River. Representatives from both Twin River and Tiverton Casino Hotel were present and spoke at the meeting.

Lawmakers discussed lottery revenues, questioned Twin Rivers and Tiverton management on operations details, and looked into the specifics of the budding sports betting operation in Rhode Island.

“The wait time [to bet] is unacceptable,” William O’Brien, a representative from North Providence, told the Indy. During the meeting, he pushed Twin River management to expedite the process to enable sports betting kiosks and a sports betting app at the casino.

“The process [of placing bets] has not gone as well as I would have liked, but how can you predict how many people are coming,” O’Brien told the Indy after the meeting. “They have made adjustments and are fixing it.”

When asked about the ethical concern of taking lost money from gamblers and filling state coffers, O’Brien said, “People are not forced to do it, they are doing it because they want to. That’s excess money.

That’s not taking it away from hardworking people who need money to support their families.” In reality though, gambling can have a detrimental impact on people from all backgrounds. According to statistics from the North American Foundation for Gambling Addiction Help, young adults are the most susceptible

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to gambling addiction, with more than 1 in 100 struggling with it. Additionally, having a parent that gambles dramatically increases the likelihood of having a problem, which means that the addiction will most likely expand in the future.

Betting kiosks, where bettors can place bets from a computer, are supposed to be active by March 11, in time for March Madness, and an app is due to be up and running by June 3. Legislation has been introduced in the State Senate that would legalize mobile sports betting from anywhere in the State, according to Senate spokesperson Greg Pare. He told the Indy that the Senate is optimistic that the legislation will pass soon.

Even though he’s not on the committee, Senate President Dominick Ruggiero was also at the meeting.

Sitting on a bar stool near the back of the room, he held a betting table for the Superbowl in his hands. Ruggiero is a prominent supporter of sports betting. He placed an inaugural, honorary first bet in November alongside Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello—and has recently introduced new mobile betting legislation, which gives bettors the ability to place bets from anywhere in Rhode Island. “People are going to do this regardless,” Ruggiero told the Indy when asked about the ethics of creating revenue from people’s misfortune. “We have programs [via Rhode Island Lottery] in place to help with betting problems… Your bookie isn't gonna help you with that.”

Ruggiero explained to the Indy that the impetus for wanting to legalize sports betting was to take advantage of the huge amount of illegal gambling already going on. According to him, 97 percent of sports gambling in the United States is done illegally (experts dispute the exact number, but most agree that it is over ninety percent). Representative O’Brien echoed Ruggiero’s stance, telling the Indy that “the most important point is that they are doing it legally.

They don’t have to worry about being arrested or crucified for gambling.” In Ruggiero’s eyes, legalizing sports betting will allow Rhode Island to create more revenue, as well as to provide help and assistance for those struggling with gambling problems. But while these services sound good on paper, they are only helpful to gambling addicts, rather than working to prevent addiction in the first place.

Ruggiero’s stance on gambling is likely informed by his personal practice: he likes to bet. He told the Indy that he bet $400 on the Patriots to win in the Super Bowl, and put $100 down a few weeks ago, when the

odds against the hometown team were six to one. His payout after the Patriots beat the Rams in last weekend's Super Bowl was over $1000.

After the meeting, legislators toured the Sportsbook. Finely dressed and surrounded by aides, they huddled near the entrance, gazing up at the basketball games playing on dozens of different screens. Ruggiero held his betting booklet in hand. +++ When the Minnesota basketball game ended, Billy stared up at one of the television screens. The Gophers had won by five points and he earned a $300 payout, but you wouldn’t know it by the look on his face: there was no change in his disposition as he went up to receive his cash. The thrill that had once accompanied winning seems to have all but disappeared.

Brian Warwick finished betting early. He was off to work the night shift. He comes once a week from Massachusetts and doesn’t take his betting too seriously. Unlike many other patrons at the casino, for the most part Brian’s relationship with sports betting seems to be a healthy one. “I don’t spend too much, It’s a lot of money to run a family,” he says. But his motivation for placing bets is the same as everyone else at Twin River: “I do like a pile of cash, I’ll tell you that.”

The next day at Twin Rivers, Ronny was in his same exact spot: second row, second seat from the right in the smoking section. He was dead asleep, slouched in front of his personal television screen and stack of racing programs. The slot machines were still blaring. The chips on the poker tables still crackling. The air still smelled like cigarettes, and the small televisions blared the same racetracks from across the country, just with different horses doing the racing.

The elevator descending from the addicting second floor was jammed with patrons leaving the casino. “Everybody happy?” said one man leaning against the wall of the elevator. He stood amongst several people wiped out from a day of gambling, who chuckled remorsefully at his question.

“I should’ve left my wallet with them at the door,” he said. “They took it all anyway.”

PEDER SCHAEFER, DEBORAH MARINI, AND JOHN GRAVES B’22 put Peder’s great aunt’s novelty Spiro Agnew bobblehead on a prop bet parlay for Chris Hogan.

METRO

10

Part I: Insects

ar can C rion Be i r et me le A

oring Scarab B B ee th tl ar

e

E

A Look at Native Species of Rhode Island

This beetle is known for it’s diskshaped antennae and its digging power. They will dig up to nine feet into the ground to lay their eggs, now that’s a powerful single mom!

Despite this bugs name, it wants NOTHING to do with a dead person’s sexuality – but feeding? “Don’t mind if I do!” The American Carrion and its larvae feed on the raw flesh of dead animals, and they love it!

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r u s s ti g m

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orpha dim idi

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t r o n p it h e c i

e ud o

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Oakworm M oth

WOW! This moth really is a beaut, eh?

Reminds me of No Doubt’s Return of Saturn album cover. It pretty much ends there. It eats oak, it has a spiky caterpillar, etc.

Hot people are always boring!

OK, this bug looks like the best smokey eye you’ve seen, but with an instagram influencer touch of orange.

Though they’re found in leaf litter, they feed on nectar, so it’s no surprise they look this good. Just peep those lashes!

ro m

Ps

a

atched Smoke P yM ge n o ra

Py

obe

What’s more charming than teeny-tiny, harmless bugs that look like scorpions?

These miniature bad-asses can be found anywhere, from between the pages of your romance novel to the edge of the Atlantic ocean.

Is she the new goth gf? The Twice-Stabbed Lady Beetle is the lady bug’s cool, alt cousin who vapes (WEED) in the bathroom at the beetle family’s Thanksgiving dinner. She literally emits a noxious gas from her legs and protects plants from those annoying asshole bugs.

il o c o

sp.

udoscorpion e s s P

tabbed Lady B S ee ice tl w T

Ch

ra s o m a

Also known as the Hag Moth, this ugly fucker is actually a caterpillar that transforms into a winged piece of shit. OK, wait... it’s actually pretty cute...

This crazy dude is a type of Assassin Bug. It bites people with its “beak.”

Fucked up. Pictured here is a nymph, which has sticky hairs that cause dirt and lint to stick to it, resulting in its absolutely grimy appearance.

d uv

lb o c e

key Slug Mon

sked Hunter Ma

Re

Bo

A ni

s o t a s ti g m a

BY Harry August ILLUSTRATION Stephanie Wu DESIGN Katherine Sang

Rhode Island is worried about its size, and for good reason. Absent a mass migration to the Ocean State before the 2020 census, Rhode Island will lose one of its two seats in the US House of Representatives, placing it in the company of the Dakotas, Alaska, Wyoming and three other states with one lone statewide representative. (It didn’t help that former Governor Lincoln Chafee announced his plans to move to Wyoming last week, even if he was just dodging estate taxes.)

This means that state lawmakers, worried not only about federal representation but a stagnant tax base, are desperate to convince current residents to stay and new ones to move in. State Representative Carlos Tobon of Pawtucket made headlines (and drew criticism) last March for pushing a bill, the “Qualified Family Migration to Rhode Island Act,” that would give out-of-state families $10,000 in tax breaks just to move here for a year. “People think we are just losing a seat [in the US House of Representatives],” Tobon told the College Hill Independent, “but we have a lot to lose. There is going to be money [from congressional appropriations] lost and influence lost, and that’s going to turn into lost opportunities.”

Rhode Island has one of the worst rates of population growth in the country: between 2010 and 2018, Rhode Island was 46th in the nation with only a 0.42 percent increase in population. Massachusetts on the other hand saw a 5.41 percent increase, while other New England states, Vermont and Connecticut, were two of the four states with slower growth than Rhode Island. This is in part due to a nation-wide trend of fast population growth in the Southwest of the US, but many also blame the so-called “brain drain”: college students fleeing to other states after they graduate.

Travis Escobar, a Rhode Island native who works on policy for United Way RI and was recently appointed to the Providence School Board, helped found an organization—“Millennial RI”— to tackle this drain. “Our population is old,” Escobar told the Indy, “We are constantly losing young people.” Escobar is backed up by numerous sources, from Providence Monthly to the Providence Journal, decrying the flight of young people. In fact, one recent study from the Brookings Institution found that Providence keeps only 36.5% of its college graduates in the state, the second lowest rate of any metropolitan area in the nation.

But whether Rhode Island actually suffers from this problem is far from certain, said Rhode Island College Professor Mikaila Arthur, who studied the trajectories of the school’s graduates. Arthur told the Indy that “it’s totally not founded,” to assume that college graduates are fleeing the state more so than they are other regions. Instead, Rhode Island’s small size and high number of students from out-of-state mean that “the issue is not that students are leaving Rhode Island, it’s that many are not from here and never intended to stay here,” Arthur told the Indy.

So, while the idea of fleeing grads has perhaps been over-hyped, the need for attracting a young and educated workforce to Rhode Island to combat the consequences of an aging and stagnant population remains. As Arthur’s report makes clear, beyond just losing half our congressional representation, Rhode Island’s ability to recruit educated workers puts the state’s prosperity at stake. For this reason, both the Governor’s free community college initiative and groups like Millennial RI are trying, in their own distinct ways, to plug the proverbial drain.

PLUGGING THE DRAIN Getting Millennials to "#ChooseRI"

a millennial professional group in a Providence Journal op-ed, and calling for those interested to get on board, Millennial RI is entering its fifth year of recruiting and representing the interests of the oft-mocked generation.

Now, Millennial RI has over 200 dues-paying members (out of the 30,000 or so millennials in the state), Escobar told the Indy, that can attend the groups events (like “Adulting 101: Uncovering the Cover Letter”) and get discounts at places like Seven Stars Bakery (but only on Mondays.) And on March 28, the organization will be hosting its fifth-annual “#ChooseRI Celebration,” the group’s “largest networking event of the year.”

The Millennial RI website walks a fine line between parody and sincerity, with a series of drone shots of the statehouse and the Gano Street bridge on its homepage and five different appearances of the “#ChooseRI” hashtag on the first page alone. Their most recent event was entitled “Doughnuts and Debt,” and all of the board member’s headshots are awkward selfies of them in suits. But behind these hyper-professional graphics is the very real apprehension that millennials face some of the worst job prospects of any recent generation. “College graduates," Escobar said, “probably have high student loan debt and stagnant wages.

These are issues that impact our entire generation—it’s harder and harder to live the American dream.”

With this in mind, Escobar is quick to point out that their mission (“We want you to keep your dreams here in Rhode Island”) is not just about singing the state’s praises. (RI’s culinary scene and coastline get special shoutouts on the website, in addition to Providence’s “cradle for creativity and risk taking.”) In addition to rebranding, Escobar understands the importance of addressing the structural problems that drive millennials to “leave and hit the reset button.” Escobar and Millenial RI have prioritized various advocacy issues over the past few years, focusing on topics important to their members, like protecting net neutrality and expanding affordable housing. Housing is especially important in Rhode Island, where a recent US Census +++ study found that it has the one of the highest rates of 18-34 year olds living at home: 37 percent. Furthermore, Escobar, now the president of Millennial RI’s board, according to a 2015 HousingWorks RI study, only 28 stays true to his generation’s archetype: he’s worried percent of Rhode Island millennials are “heading about branding. “Rhode Island is just undervalued,” households,” down from 41 percent in 2000. The group Escobar told the Indy. (Equally stereotypical: Escobar is ramping up this advocacy element in the coming did not respond to multiple voicemails on his work months, Escobar told the Indy, and will be releasing a landline but immediately responded to a Twitter direct policy agenda in late February: “Jobs, education, and message). “People here always say, ‘I can’t wait to housing are the big three.” leave,’ but growing up here, I just never believed that.”

“We kept seeing negative articles about mille- +++ nials and the brain drain,” Escobar said. When the Providence Journal published a piece entitled “Middle While it is an easy problem to laugh about, there is Class Squeeze: Millennials seeking jobs find better little doubt that attracting millenials is an important prospects outside RI,” Escobar and other young profes- policy objective for most mayors and governors sionals felt moved to action. After proposing the idea of nationwide. As a result, especially before census years,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

local governments have tried all sorts of measures to keep their populations in-state. Recently ousted Massachusetts representative Mike Capuano, for example, once told WBUR that increasing air conditioner use in the state “would keep our population in Massachusetts.” Other towns, such as one in Iowa and one in Nebraska—in a kind of twenty-first century reiteration of the Homestead Act—will give free parcels of land to anyone willing to move there and build a home.

Here in Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo is trying her best to do the same, with two policies specific to helping recent graduates stay in Rhode Island. One of them, the “Ocean State Grad Grant,” pays up to $7,000 of recent college graduates down payments on their first homes. And the other, the “Wavemaker Fellowship,” gives a refundable tax credit of up to $6,000 a year for graduates working STEM jobs to cover their student loans. These policies, by explicitly targeting those already educated—those who might attend a Millennial RI networking event—could miss the broader problems specific to Rhode Island.

To Professor Arthur, the fundamental issue is that Rhode Islanders are not graduating in the first place.

“The reality is people are struggling to get through college—it’s because they have trouble getting degrees in the first place. They don’t have the resources they need.” The Governor’s recently launched initiative to offer free tuition at the Community College of Rhode Island will help address this, Arthur told the Indy, and should be expanded to include Rhode Island College as well. As her research found, “more than two-thirds of students graduating from Rhode Island College are still in Rhode Island a year after graduation, and the majority either stay in Rhode Island for their entire careers or leave for a time and return.” And perhaps most importantly, the Rhode Island Promise gives Rhode Islanders “that feeling that the state has invested in them and cares about their future,” thus reinforcing their desire to stay, Arthur told Indy.

These kinds of statistics show that as much as people love to envision a constant exodus of millennials, many Rhode Islanders educated in-state do, in fact, stick around. Still, both Arthur and Escobar reinforced that the inclination to disparage Rhode Island— jokingly or otherwise—is strongest among those born in-state. “There are a lot of people here who just have not seen what Rhode Island can offer compared to other places,” Arthur said, while she and other transplants usually just think, “How did I get lucky enough to live here?” It is perhaps for this reason that just this past Wednesday, CNN Travel published an article, “Is Providence the USA’s Most Underrated City?” Escobar and Arthur would probably say yes.

HARRY AUGUST B ’19 might just, in fact, #ChooseRI.

METRO

12

WHAT I D E N R A LE E M O H T A

BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Carly Paul DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

On her walk home each day she sees the whole shape of the island from afar before she steps into it. She has always wanted to live on an island. She speaks of her world in self-contained units, as if there is only one of everything. Sister. City. House. Work. Brother. Brother.

We have two brothers so sometimes she has to name them, or else we will only have one.

The Snakes The garden snakes in New England are harmless. The first one I saw was dead and on our driveway. It dried for three days in the July heat until my mother swept it into the forest scrub. It seemed to have separated into four layers of itself, each body a piece of translucent film taut against the next.

My grandfather smashed the backyard snakes for good luck. Thatha ate no meat his whole life and patiently carried thin spiders by their legs from the bathroom to the backyard. But he would never hesitate to kill the snakes.

Once, I watched him drop a sharp black stone on the head of a garden snake. In the same split-second the body seemed to fuse solid and then shatter. The dead snake looked like a human limb broken at every joint.

It lay in a brittle zigzag on the front steps as though the blow punctured its body and from the hole drained all of its fleshy sway. Thatha was proud, patted me on the shoulder as though we had done the task together, told me we would both have good luck for the rest of our lives. The flaky snakeskin glimmered beneath us. Later that afternoon my mother scolded her father. Whether it was for teaching me how to kill a snake or for trusting luck in such small things I still cannot say.

One time when Thatha was young he watched a cobra leave his house as he was coming into it. Inside, my grandmother was sleeping in a yellow room.

Pondicherry was musty and wet in August, and he watched the cobra slip out like the coils of rain that pushed for days against the foundation of the house.

The bees are dead, Meara told me over the phone one day. It was March of 2016, and I had seen the bees everything turns inside out. My mother peels off all earlier in the winter, when they seemed to be sleeping. the photographs in my bedroom and mounts them in We climbed the ladder to the rooftop and scraped the the hallway just outside of it. The desk cabinets vomit. ice where we could.

Scraps of paper pool on the bedroom floor.

In the summer by the lake, Meara says she will go for a I tell my mother about most of the dreams she is inside swim. She never goes swimming: it’s always a swim. of. She is always surprised. All through high school we perfect the art of wringing out the space between The lake is made of many things: the island, the boat, us. We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen counter the rain, the muck. Meara is swimming in a circle. The for two hours because neither of us knows how to leave. lake is filling to the brim.

Her voice climbs higher than mine, stretches its limbs around the room, and holds it still until the whole space aches. When my mother and I fought, we rose Superstition to the outsides of ourselves, voices breaking from our centers but catching on our skin like tiny pinpricks. We This is what I learned at home— let our centers swell. Inside of me, two headaches: both of them inch-thick. The first forming beneath the eyes, Position your bed so that at night your head aligns the second behind the nape of the neck. Everything in with south. Wash your hands and your mouth when between pressing outwards. you come inside from outside. Sleep with oil in your hair the night before a birthday—and in the morning, Once, on a particularly tired morning, I left the house before anything else, look at yourself in the mirror. See saying only goodbye. My mother worried all day. In in the glass a year of your life, and step into the bath to Tamil, the word for goodbye translates to I’ll go and wash it off. Never touch your feet to books, but if you do, return. There’s no one word I can think of that means touch the book to your hand and the hand to your head. departure but anticipates arrival. This one binds the Use your right hand to serve yourself food. Use your two: both exit and entry at once, inside and outside right hand to accept money. Always accept food that is held in place. Nothing scares my mother more than offered to you, but never touch a serving spoon to the uncoupling them. plate—things contaminate easily. Never touch your lips to a cup when sipping from it: saliva is meant to live I spend nights with my limbs falling asleep beneath on the inside. Crush a lime beneath the tires of a new me. It is easy to wake up to numbness sparkling car before driving it on the street. Sit down in a chair for through fingers before the feeling fully leaves, and a few moments before embarking on a journey. Neem then to be left alone with the weight of your own hand. leaf in the luggage will keep the pests away.

Sometimes, when the weight is sticky, the limbs stay asleep all day. /

The snake had been inside the bedroom. It did not wake my grandmother. It left droppings on the floorboards and the quilt had puffed and collapsed around the shape of its settled body. Thatha cleaned up the traces and pulled the windows shut before the monsoon started again. My grandmother slept deeply The Sister those days. She slept through the whole thing.

My sister used to keep bees. Soon, they became the bees. She drove to upstate New York in a minivan to get the bees. My sister has a friend named Michael The Field and Michael gave her the bees. Soon Michael was Bee Friend.

One night in high school I dream that I am wandering in a dry, hot field. In the morning my head feels as though Now my sister lives on an island between two rivers. it is filled with glue. In the dream I am surrounded by On the island there are four women named Fiona, and other lost people and I do not know the day of the week. snowdrops bloom in January. The ground is covered in I ask the question to everyone I pass by and they cannot white hail, and we spend six hours by the fireplace at a hear me. I do not know what day it is and soon I can feel pub called The Punter. It is a Tuesday night and boys heat cementing in my palms and the hinges in my jaw, are playing cards at a wooden table. Across the street dream-form mixing with skin. in my sister’s house, the roommate is bleaching her shaven head in the bathroom sink. My sister tells me That month I have other strange dreams. In one, the best pubs will feel like an extension of your own house before she tells me anything else.

13

FEATURES

After Thatha passed away we could not cook in my aunt’s house for ten days. We washed our hair every morning, ate food the neighbors brought, and lit a wick in the living room that burned for twenty-one days.

The day we arrived, my brother and I found a fruit tree in the backyard. We gathered a basket of mealy apples, purpling and scaly from the dry Utah sun, and snuck them into the bedroom we shared, eating them when our mother and grandmother were out of view. We left the uneaten ones outside. Black beads are for married women only, and the morning we left Utah, my grandmother gave my mother all of the black-beaded jewelry she owned, untangling them from an old leather box.

My mother gave the necklaces to me, and I wear them despite knowing what it means. My grandmother blew out the candle when she returned home from the airport and spent the rest of the day cleaning apple rot from the front steps.

TARA SHARMA B'20.5 knows what day it is.

08 FEB 2019

we inherited nothing but typhoons from these colonizers ed our corn husk skins grow parch with fear of the loving water

should we stay safe and bitter inside?

co let us me peel o pen our corn husk

skins

or

in burning healing through the damp skin shivers our rigid husks soften

and we could be like children beaming fro m ear-to-ea r

dancing in the storm’s waters

"SOLVING" TRANSLATION Women's labor on the page

“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him – Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.”—The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy Awareness of the ways in which language mediates recognition and participation in the public sphere is increasingly coming to the forefront, whether through analyses of sexist media coverage in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or the implementation of a fine (up to $250,000) in New York for intentionally using the wrong name or pronoun for a transgender person.

Arundhati Roy illustrates this fact poetically through the story of Anjum, an intersex woman, known as a hijra in South Asia, who must navigate life through a language that does not accommodate her.

The question of gender bias in language becomes especially inescapable as we move between different languages, where distinct histories and grammatical systems define the boundaries of what can be expressed; it is in translation that the artificiality of these structures is exposed. Arundhati Roy herself describes Ministry as a novel “translated from the original”—exposing how the very fact of rendering a story in language is a kind of intervention that necessarily imposes a specific interpretive structure.

The most common way translating gender is approached has been through grammatical gender differences between English and Romance languages.

In the latter, nouns are gendered (for example, a bike versus un vélo in French or una bicicleta in Spanish).

There has also been recent interest as to how different languages approach the gender neutral pronoun (they, ze, and hir in English, x or @ in Spanish).

When simplified to an algorithmic approach such as Google Translate, however, this question is further complicated. There have been well-documented cases of Translate turning phrases with gender-neutral pronouns into gendered pronouns along sexist lines, for example “he is a surgeon” or “she is a nurse.”

The question of how bias is perpetuated through language will only become more pressing as we move closer to a world that runs on automatic translation services, with the spread of products such as Google Glass, which are meant to incorporate technology even more fluidly into the way we live our lives. Eva Vanmassenhove, a PhD candidate at Dublin City University, described in an article for Slator, a language industry intelligence publication, a hypothetical situation in which a selection algorithm using Google Translate could accidentally eliminate candidates for a job because a gender-neutral term gets translated from one language into a male or female variant in another language.

Only a month ago, Google announced its efforts to reduce gender bias in its translations as part of its broader mission to “solve” translation and thus make all information universally accessible. Such an endeavor has significant potential for impact, especially given that Translate’s reach is immense: more than 500 million people use the service, which processes more than 100 billion words each day.

Perhaps even more relevant is the fact that the vast majority of users (92 percent) come from outside the United States, suggesting Translate’s supplemental importance in addressing inequities related

15

ARTS

to language access, given English’s hegemonic dominance. (Over 55 percent of all web content is in English, though only a fifth of the world’s population speaks English at all. Just a quarter of that fifth speak it as their native tongue.)

Although the utopian vision of a world where translation allows for universally accessible knowledge is a commendable one, approaching gender bias as a challenge that can be “solved” through the tweaking of an algorithm obscures the roots of these issues: the presence of bias in Translate’s database (made up largely of the Bible, United Nations and European Union documents, and mystery novels), and more importantly, in the very assumptions of what makes for a ‘correct’ translation.

As Google aims for free, easy, and instantaneous translation, we must ask what we are sacrificing for this ease. To understand this question’s political and social ramifications, it is necessary to revisit the history of gender and translation itself. +++ The work of translation has often been cast in metaphorical terms, and more specifically, gendered ones.

The most prominent example of this is the French phrase les belles infidèles, which suggests that translations, like women, can either be beautiful or faithful.

Moreover, the nature of the French language makes it so that infidèle is a feminine noun—les beaux infidèles is an impossible statement.

Tapping into sexist connotations of fidelity, the phrase compares translation to a marriage, structured by an implicit contract between the original (male) and the translation (female). The opposition of faithful to unfaithful also determines how translations are judged—that is, in terms of how well they reproduce the sacrosanct original. This view stems from a view of translation encapsulated by Umberto Eco: "Translation is the art of failure." If one takes translation as impossible by nature, betrayal is a given.

More broadly, patriarchal systems rely on these metaphors to justify translation as feminine—and therefore, an inferior process. Few know the name of the translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gregory Rabassa, who Gabriel Gárcia Márquez himself said produced a better work than the original, and arguably did as much as Márquez to influence authors such as Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie who read Solitude in translation. Moreover, the coding of the original as precious production and the translation as unchaste reproduction also has implications for how the labor of translation is valued in the marketplace.

What is ultimately at stake is, as Lori Chamberlain, one of the few prominent women theorists of translation, puts it, is “the struggle for authority and the politics of originality.” +++ The supposed inferiority of the translation led to the rise of feminist translations, which aim to render the female subject visible by being explicitly unfaithful to the original. One of the most prominent examples is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La habana para un infante difunto (Infante’s Inferno). Infante was a widely celebrated author and winner of the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world, the Miguel de Cervantes prize. The book, a celebrated Cuban novel, follows

the sexual education of the author on the island under Fidel Castro.

The original is, in Levine’s words, “unabashadley pornographic,” and “mocks” and “manipulates” women. Her translation, in turn, mocks and manipulates men. For example, she translates the victimblaming phrase "no one man can rape a woman," as "no wee man can rape a woman," using the text’s continuous reliance on alliteration against itself.

While discussing her approach, Levine offers a metaphorical alternative to les belles infidèles—that of the traduttora traditora, or an intentionally traitorous female translator. This alternative of intentional unfaithfulness, however, continues to operate within a paradigm in which faithfulness is the ultimate measure of a translation. Levine remains caught in an ambivalence to fidelity, claiming that being unfaithful is a form of faithfulness to the text, a claim supported by her alleged "collaboration" with Infante.

Furthermore, words used to describe this strategy— such as castration—reveal its continued reliance on assumed gender relations. While working against patriarchal language, subverting faithfulness to a misogynistic original through translation continue to reinscribe gender norms.

Other approaches to translation jettison a hierarchy that places the translation over the original text entirely. In this view, translation is framed as production in its own right, striving not for the invisibility of the translator but instead privileging the traces of their labor throughout.

There are several recent translations by women that put such a model into practice. One is by Emily Wilson, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, who published a translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 2017.

With more than 60 translations of the Odyssey dating back to the third century BCE, Wilson’s was the first by a woman. Thus, the fact of Wilson’s gender is—unfortunately—radical, but it is also the basis of the book’s marketing campaign, marking one of the few times when a female translator’s labor is made visible.

And for those who wonder whether a ‘female sensibility’ would affect the translation of an ancient text which has been through dozens of permutations, Wilson’s text provides ample evidence. One example is Wilson’s approach to the Greek word kunopis, a rare word literally meaning “dog-face,” which had before been translated as “whore” or “bitch.” She instead chose the word “hounded,” arguing that the connotations of female destructiveness are not integral to the original. Thus, Wilson’s work seems to participate in the tradition of feminist translations, as she re-translates a man’s work that, in her words, was invested in “female fidelity and male dominance.” But such an approach is perhaps essentializing and not the only productive angle with which to judge the work of female translators.

Other criteria—such as depth, clarity, coherence— that are used to judge any original literary work, can and should apply to translations as well. The “fresh[ness]” of Wilson’s translation is part of the reason for which academics such as Stephen Kidd, a professor of classics at Brown University, decided to use her text in his class Greek Mythology. He told the Independent that he had thought he had seen every possible variant of the first line of the Odyssey—“Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways” (such as “many wiles,” “skilled,” “many turns”)—but was still pleasantly surprised by Wilson’s choice of the word “complicated.” In his

08 FEB 2019

BY Saanya Jain ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

words, it was “something new, simple, and poignant.”

It is one of many choices that brings a new facet to the Odyssey, even for a reader who knows the original Ancient Greek and has devoted his life to its study.

And it is not just Kidd who appreciates it. The students “seem to like it very much,” Kidd told the Independent: “It's about as far from a stilted translation as you can get.”

Wilson’s increased visibility, both through the marketing of the translation and her choices throughout the text, is not the only way in which her work serves as a model for reconsidering the inequalities inherent in our current approach to translation: the manner in which she approaches the “Translator’s Note,” normally used to apologize for the ways the subsequent text has been ‘unfaithful,’ instead proposed an an entirely different model for approaching and judging translation. She argues that while she approaches the original with great respect, as a classics scholar, she aims for “a new and coherent English text, which conveys something of that [original] understanding but operates within an entirely different cultural context”: one that is more aware of the (re)production of unequal relations within language.

Such a paradigm may seem limited to feminist translations; however, there is much to learn generally from translations of texts written by women, and in fact explicitly against patriarchy.

There are numerous examples where this has gone poorly. One prominent one is the English translation of Simone Beauvoir’s “feminist bible” The Second Sex, done by H. M. Parshley. This was the version that made bestseller lists, was reprinted several times and read throughout the United States. It is also one that features unmarked deletions of more than ten percent of the original (particularly to do with the names and achievements of women in history; the centering of which was integral to Beauvoir’s approach of feminist historiography) as well as the omission of any references to lesbians.

A different approach to texts written by women is embodied by the first recipient in 2016 of the updated Man Booker International Prize: Deborah Smith’s English translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, originally in Korean. The Vegetarian is a three-part novella which tells the story of Yeong-hye, who stops eating meat after a nightmare, leading to devastating consequences for her personal life.

The win provoked significant controversy, as the book was criticized for diverging too much from the original, further compounded by the fact that Smith had “only” been learning Korean for three years prior to the undertaking, despite the fact that Han herself stands by the translation. Criticisms range from the minute—the substitution of arm (pal) for leg (bal)—to accusations of a complete overhaul of Han’s bland, repetitive, spare style (to English readers) enabled and in some ways required by Korean, to one that is more poetic and embellished, which arguably corresponds to the expectations of readers in English and style of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the English language.

The implications of moving from a language as different as Korean to one as dominant as English, as well as Smith’s positionality as a white, young, then-PhD student translating the work of a woman of color, are important considerations when evaluating the structures that allowed for the successful production and reception of the work. The charge of unfaithfulness, however, is not inherent to those facts—and, furthermore, not the primary criteria through which the merit of a translation should be judged.

Smith took the critique that her work was indeed an entirely different book from the original, and reversed its impact by owning it. Indeed, her translation was an entirely different book—a work in its own right. She thus recategorized reproductive labor as inherently creative. She abandoned the paradigm of the faithful translation—one rooted very much in the assumed correlation between femininity and inferiority—in favor of one that should be judged on its own terms.

Such an approach is further modeled by the judging process for the prize. The committee does not compare the original and the translation side-by-side, but instead looks for a synergy between content and style in the translation, for a coherent whole produced in a new language. It is also reflected in the fact that the prize money, £50,000, is shared equally between the translator and author.

Furthermore, the genesis of The Vegetarian can in some ways be a new approach to translation. It no longer requires (and thus privileges) scholars, and instead opens the door for those who have a passion for another language, culture and text. It also serves as a model of creation based on collaboration, as Kang and Smith both state that they collaborated “on every word.”

The Vegetarian provides potential language with which to evaluate women’s work, both original and translation, that is not inherently gendered—although much is left open to question with regards to its implications for the movement of art across other axes of power differentials.

Finally, the vocabulary around a different form of translation—that of adaptations, for example from books to television or film—is also a valuable one to consider. While many critics may still compare the new media form with the original, adaptations, for the most part, are given more license and recognized as an achievement of their own; just think of the eleven Oscar nominations and wins for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation The Return of the King, which is tied with Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most Oscars ever won by a single film.

The language around adaptation is not effeminate, and the adaptation itself is not automatically considered inferior, but judged according to the possibilities and limitations of a new medium.

Another particularly interesting example is the aptly-named film movie Adaptation, ostensibly based on Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief. Charlie

Kaufman, the screenwriter, foregrounds the process of adaptation by depicting a fictionalized version of his own attempts to adapt Orlean’s book, introducing both himself (played by Nicholas Cage) and Orlean (Meryl Streep) as characters into the movie. This approach, too, explores the possibilities offered by an entirely different medium, thereby rendering the question of faithfulness unnecessary—perhaps even irrelevant.

Remarkably, when such adaptations fail to find a coherence in their target medium, the language of translation re-appears: for example, The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, commenting on Saverio Costanzo’s television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, writes that the show “sublimat[es] itself to its literary source, like a caring translator.”

It is necessary to redefine the connotation of translation from failure and gendered betrayal to one that exalts it as an act of creation, where the original functions as the raw material for the production of a new text. +++ These issues will become only more integral as the production of meaning moves from the individual, who can be called out in the pages of literary reviews, to an algorithm in a black box. As translations increasingly touch more and more people’s lives in contexts outside of the explicitly artistic, it is important to think through what assumptions this automaticity requires and begets.

While it may seem that moving from the male editor to a non-human would break translation out of an explicitly gendered model, AI will never be able to “solve” translation as long as it continues to reflect and perpetuate our societal biases.

As Arundhati Roy shows us, it is impossible for us to exist outside of language. But perhaps our approach to difference can be reevaluated, from something to be overcome, requiring assimilation and invisibility, to an approach that instead exposes the structures that support difference in the first place. As Smith puts it, we can interrogate “the point of difference rather than just pointing it out.”

Ultimately, language is not neutral. Perhaps if we can find non-sexist ways of understanding and evaluating labor, not only will women’s translation become less rare, but so will the subjugation of reproductive labor in all its forms.

SAANYA JAIN B'19 is vegetarian and bets you will become one too after reading The Vegetarian.

ARTS

16

MANIFESTO

BY Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION Claribel Wu DESIGN Amos Jackson

1. Tell me more things, many more things.

2. Like what you think our combined worth is. Then I could subtract what I know yours to be to find mine.

3. One time I saw a dead bird and I swore never again.

4. I teach my students: • How to add simple things together, like: • Tomato + Straw = Airplane • - Power = Sex • To be polite and when they need to know something, to raise their eyes up and ask the heavens, “Can you even do anything about this?”

• To smile when I tell them to.

• That the universe is expanding, except for our minds, which do this sort of dance…

5. We women are too gentle with ourselves.

6. I change the lesson plan to be less about the human condition and more about my conditions, which involve delusions and excellence.

7. When you say things like “I love you,” or “I’d clone you like a dog,” I will do what any good lover would do.

8. I want you to: • Be happy with the way I make us morning yogurt • Be slow and soft • Breathe lots • Know when to ask many questions 9. If I were your therapist, I’d start with: “Well, you’re obviously very smart.”

10. You could be nicer to everyone, by the way.

11. The children dig up worms with plastic spoons, put them into bags for a lesson in three parts: • Emotional: I have them write their darkest thoughts along the sides of the incisions.

They peel open the worms and stick pins through their words to hold the flaps apart.

• Material: What is missing? Many things, notably a heart. But remember these surrogate five looped vessels on Valentine’s Day. • Spiritual: Bury the worms, believe what you will about what follows.

12. I’ll meet your animal and go something like, “This cat isn’t supposed to be here, it has snowy mountain legs. This cat is so depressed.” You’ll ask me, “Where do you get off telling me Lacey is unhappy?”

13. I am trying to suffer nobly, like some sort of martyr being dragged naked from the back of a horse-drawn cart. All she wanted to do was frequent the libraries.

14. Take off your shoes, if you’re going to come in.

15. Finding you was so hard. It would have been easier to raise my voice in a crowded space and shout, “So who here wants to fuck me?”

16. I will ask my students, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

• I will not teach them the Oedipal Complex.

17. Will you come over and be my mosquito netting tonight? And by that I mean, will you share my bed and make sure your blood is sweeter than mine? And to do this will you think only nice thoughts of me and dream of not-confusing things?

18. A yellow slide is somehow more suffocating than a black one. Inside the yellow slide, it is like a bright interrogation lamp, it is like a god’s iris.

19. In a black slide, there is no underbelly, no anatomy, no eyes—just a wet, dark passage to slip through.

20. Cheap, plastic crystals make it easy to see many versions of yourself. Hold this pink one up to the light (or actually, your eye) and you can see the supermarket cashier refracted many times around the place, in little hexagons of discomfort, pressing his face to the pink glass. I will buy it as an instrument of knowledge, of angles, and of the world and the ways in which we tell ourselves one version exists and how the one version we choose is always wrong.

21. The students ask me things like: • “Do you actually like us?”

• “Sometimes.”

• “Where do all the squirrels go when they die?”

• “What do you think spills out when they cut open trees?”

17

LITERARY

08 FEB 2019

• “If you were really once married to a locksmith, how come you couldn’t get us into the library last week?”

• “Occasionally we fail even ourselves.”

22. They think they know what violence is ever since they saw me accidentally drop one of them down some stairs. The parents understood it was an accident, and so did the school once the kid was ok and I passed a drug test. But it was beautiful, watching him tumble blond hair over jean shorts and get up with only a teary face and some disloyal thoughts. To rise from a trial unscathed.

23. To teach them about true brutality I told the story about the poison tree frog room at the Museum of Natural History in Greenland. How the golden poison dart frog was attracted to the woman wearing tea tree oil in her hair to protect from lice. How that smell reminded the golden frog of a lover it used to once know, and how it jumped gracefully, moved through the humid air and from a swaying branch to the shoulder of a long sleeve shirt. And then up to an exposed neck. And how that one touch, that skin-to-golden-skin contact, like Midas’ finger to his daughter, transformed a fluid body into a rigid one.

24. Then I asked them to lower their heads and raise their hands if they’d still walk through the room. I was teaching them about probability: “This only happened once, in all the years.” A surprising number raised their hands.

25. Students in order of least to most favorite: • The one who peed herself on the way to the park.

• The one who threatens to call his older brother on me.

• The one who wears earmuffs even when it is warm outside.

• The one who kicks on the bathroom door when there’s a wait and screams about wishing they were never potty trained.

26. I’ll see it a lot of ways, you’ll see it a lot of ways. Our conversations will feel like two monologues constantly interrupting each other’s momentum. Or else like I am telling you things you’ve always suspected but never confirmed.

27. When you write things down on a piece of paper, I will bend over to read it, no matter if it says “Wake up and go!” or “cradling grandfather.”

28. I never have the memory for a cup of tea.

29. I think I let go of that kid on purpose. Just to see his blond curls float and jangle on the way down.

30. Do you feel better or worse when I act worse? And is that better or worse?

31. Together, my students and I learn about witch trials and unfair persecution. To understand superstition, we re-enact the eating of witch cake. Instead of urine, we bake in the tears of children bullied by a known bully they are too scared to name. We feed it to the first dog we can find. I tell them, “If this cake were effective, not just a tall tale, then the mysterious bully would be screaming out in pain right now, would feel as though they were being eaten by the dog here. We would have caught the bully. Now can someone tell me the definition of tall tale?”

32. Tonight please dream: • Of sawing a house horizontally in half. Bit by bit push the new lid off and look inside.

• That it is daylight savings.

33. I’ll dream: • Of hearing you come through the door and wake myself up to cry out your name.

34. Instead of a rewards chart with star or smiling stickers on it I have made a construction paper version of the Donner Pass and the students’ name cards ride in little wagons and wear bonnets. The furthest anyone’s gotten this year is a little over halfway before being sent back hungry and cold to the beginning. None have turned cannibals yet.

35. I can bet on death and it doesn’t feel like a dirty thing to do until the morning.

36. When my hands do things, I don’t always know what they’re up to. So I watch the ways others do things. A woman with flowery socks is petting her dog’s leash and not the dog. She is practically giving the red nylon a handjob. And neither the dog nor the rope are getting anything out of this. And I can’t imagine the synthetic comfort the woman favors over the fur at her feet.

How much must be wrong with her.

37. I don’t like being there for other people. I like the feeling of someone rubbing my back as I cry.

Keeping me warm with just one hand. There’s a beautiful asymmetry to it.

38. I am trying to tell you something, please listen. I am trying to tell you I know where things are and if you close your eyes you can find them too.

39. Maybe I’ll bring you to visit my class and they’ll ask why you’re there, and you’ll say, “I am glad to be learning this all again, here with all of you.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

18

belly up – it's

the list

Fri

What’s the Purpose of Life? // Smith-Buonanno Hall 201 (187 Meeting Street) // 7-8PM // This is certainly the question that I ask myself when I’m in this building. That’s all!

PVD Shanty Sing // The Parlour (1119 North Main Street) // 6-9PM // Once you’ve figured out what the purpose of life is, you can go sing karaoke like a pirate and figure it out all over again! The event description is VERY SPECIFIC about the fact that cursing like a salty sailor will only be allowed after 7:30, so if you have a penchant for sea-words, come late.

Sat

El Handy Dandy DIY Fashion and Talent Show // Social Enterprise Greenhouse (10 Davol Square) // 4-7PM // This event is queering the idea of fashion shows by also being a business expo, and I highly encourage you to go patronize this showcase of queer-owned local businesses, including Mister Sister and Alien Athletes.

It’s Whatever with DJ Nes // Troop (60 Valley Street) // 10PM-2AM // A small aside: this List Writer (LW) has a former lover saved in his phone as “it’s whatever,” which is both how I felt about him and how he responded when I asked if we were dating. So if your love life is as… whatever… as mine, dance it away at this DJ night which should be anything but.

Sun

The Cosmic Cat’s Valentine’s Day Psychic Fair // The Purple Cat Tavern (11 Money Hill Road, Chepachet) // 11AM-5PM // What if you ask the Cosmic Cat about your future romantic prospects and she looks into hercrystal ball to find that you are indeed #foreveralone? Have no fear! She’s a medium too, so you can just spend your Valentine’s week with dead people instead. At a winery to boot!

Mon

PVD Market- Show your Love for LOCAL // Providence Place Mall (1 Providence Place) // 10AM-9PM // Sponsored by the Providence Place Mall, whose social media team is hyping up this event on facebook with the following slogan: “You can't buy LOVE, but you can buy LOCAL”! But can you actually support such an vague ideal as the ‘local economy’ by buying a tchotchke—let’s say, an embroidery hoop with an anchor on it—at an irregularly scheduled pop-up like this one? Let me be clear—LOVE and CRAFTSMANSHIP are both fake.

Tues

It's About the Voucher: Source of Income Discrimination in RI // RI State House (82 Smith Street) // 11:30AM-12PM // Join the SouthCoast Fair Housing and the Homes RI Income Discrimination Coalition for the release of "It's About the Voucher, " a study isolating various sources of income discrimination in Rhode Island. Discussion will focus on how landlords discriminate against working-class tenants based on the industries they’re employed in, favoring professional-class tenants regardless of anybody's ability to pay rent. Lunch will be provided.

Wed

Un-Valentine's Day Horror Movie Screening // Revival Brewing Company (505 Atwood Ave, Cranston) // 9-11PM // Join Revival Brewing Company for a screening of Canadian slasher cultclassic My Bloody Valentine (1981)! The movie follows an angry undead miner (Harry) who takes out his vengeful wrath on a group of sex-crazed teens at a municipally sponsored V-Day dance at the local mine where Harry perished several years prior. Actually a much better North American film about labor than blacklisted DSA favorite Salt of the Earth.

Thurs

A Chocolate Affair // Providence Marriott Downtown (1 Orms Street) 9PM– ;) // $239 lol // After frantically searching through listings of all the Valentine’s Day dinner packages available for purchase this coming Thursday, this LW has found the single most extravagant one. Included in a couple’s ticket are: overnight accommodations at the Providence G, admission for two to a 3-course dessert tasting paired with after dinner liquors, and two (2) thirty minute massages at the G Salon & Spa. Somehow I’m expecting a chocolate fondue fountain and a half-assed backrub—amounting to a patently aromantic staycation. BTW: if anyone wants to take me out, you’ll have to drop at least 1000 bucks.