The College Hill Independent: 9 March 2012

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V O L U M E

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T HE COL L EGE HIL L INDEPEN DEN T NEWS

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FROM THE EDITORS

WEEK IN REVIEW

ELIZABETH KOH, OYINKAN OSOBAMIRO, SOPHIA SEAWELL

DIS’PUTIN BARRY ELKINTON

SCIENCE

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MIND CONTROL GREG SEWITZ

INTERVIEWS

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SWEDE MALICE SARAH RUTHERFORD

O C C U LT

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SPEAK NOW SANDEEP NAYAK

FEATURES

They were sitting around the low table, feet on the low table, beer bottles on the low table, watching the television, melting in front of the television glow. I came home and they asked me if I wanted to place a bet.

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I’m just going to lose.”

“No, you won’t. No one has any idea who will win. Even advanced statisticians are at a loss.”

And I’m not usually a gambling man but this was the opportunity to gamble if ever there was one, if ever there was a time to scrap a few dollars off of a few slightly drunk men, sitting in their shapeless sweat-stained pajamas, watching the politics of our nation unfold as though they were the Madonna halftime show. And though the sequins and the fireworks and the computer graphics were not part of this show, certainly the grappling celebrity appeal was, filling our homes and many others with the sweet sense of mystery that comes every four years.

“His hair looks stupid.”

“Romney isn’t that bad. He just gets a bad rap.”

“Stephen Colbert is still my top choice.”

Super Tuesday: a passing glance at the New York Times and a flitter at the top of your gmail account, a buffer in between ESPN and Comedy Central, a little pile of weathered bills on the table, a little monument to 2012, consecrating one of the goofiest primaries in our shortlived political attention span, aside from Romney squaring off against McCain four years ago.

Perhaps we thought that when we turn off our televisions the politicians disappear, retiring from their half-time shows to wash off the glitter, embalmed in YouTube and Google.

And I left them at the low table, beer bottles in a perimeter around the stack of money. I opened my textbooks, reading until I fell asleep, forgetting about the fight for the country until this morning when one of my friends told me he won ten dollars. That’s at least two beers at the bar.

9 BEWARE THE MADNESS 1 0 CASINO ROYALE GILLIAN BRASSIL, CHRIS COHEN, TAYLOR KELLEY

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EPHEMERA

DAVID ADLER, MALCOLM BURNLEY, JONATHAN STORCH

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OFF COLOR DANA REILLY

ARTS

1 4 TELL ‘EM 1 5 FROM THE TUBE TAYLOR KELLEY

RAILLAN BROOKS, SARAH DENACI, EDDIE FRIEDMAN, WILL PETERSON, NICK SHULMAN, KATE VAN BROCKLIN, JONAH WOLF

FOOD

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PILE OF TRIPE MAYA SIKAND

SPORTS

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ON JEREMY LIN ALEX SEOH

LITERARY

1 8 GOOD INTENTIONS BEN NADLER

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ANNIE MACDONALD

ABOUT MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES David Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alex Corrigan, Dylan Treleven, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Andrew Beers, Jess Bendit, Abigail Cain, Olivia Fialkow, Jared Stern ∙ CREATIVE CONSULTANTS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Dylan Treleven Cover Art: Josh Sunderman

CORRECTION Last week’s issue (March 2 2012) misattributed the cover art to Robert Sandler.

The cover was created by Annika Finne. The Independent regrets the error.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT PO BOX 1930 BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie theindy.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people–advocates, activists, journalists, artists– make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

WEEK IN REVIEW GRADE GRUBBING

LIVE FREE

MI$BEHAVING

by Sophia Seawell

by Elizabeth Koh

by Oyinkan Osobamiro

n February 24, the New York City Department of Education released “value-added” rankings of 18,000 public school teachers to the public, after various media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times sued for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. Much to the chagrin of the United Federation of Teachers, who appealed the case, an appellate court upheld the decision.

The rankings were calculated with a mathematical formula that uses the standardized test scores of a teacher’s past classes to project future scores. The teachers were then rated by subject according to the relationship of their students’ actual scores to the projected scores. If a student’s score was projected to increase and it decreased, the teacher’s ranking would go down.

Opponents of releasing the scores have pointed to studies that show the correlation between standardized test scores and socioeconomic status; students from households with higher incomes tend to fare better than students from poorer households. Other factors such as health issues and parental support can also affect a student’s scores. However, according to the Huffington Post, the method used to calculate the rankings claimed to control for variables such as “race, gender, socioeconomic status, and even … the size of the class and how many students are new to the city.”

The rankings’ wide margins of error have been a main point of criticism from opponents. According to the New York Times, “On average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam. These errors stem from the methodology of the rankings, which compare teachers who have similar student demographics and scores.” This makes it more difficult for teachers in schools with students who are already scoring highly on the test to receive favorable rankings.

Although the Department of Education’s chief academic officer Shael Polakow-Suranksy promised that “no principal would ever make a decision on this score alone,” some principals have reportedly used the rankings to help make tenure decisions, give bonuses, and even influence terminations.

Others have voiced concerns that the release of the rankings may ultimately prove counterproductive to teacher performance.

Citing findings from a Center for American Progress study that publicly naming teachers tied to the performance of their students undermines improvements to public school systems, Cynthia Brown, vice president of education policy at the CAP called the release of the value-added data “irresponsible,” adding that disclosure makes it “much harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that actually work.”

he New Hampshire House of Representatives is considering a bill to repeal a 2009 state law allowing same-sex couples to wed. If the repeal passes, which seems unlikely, New Hampshire will be the first state to reverse its position on the issue of gay marriage.

The bill, introduced in January 2011

by Representative David Bates (R), would designate future marriages as civil unions, leaving intact the almost 2,000 marriages that have already taken place.

“What we’re talking about and what’s trying to be represented as a wonderful, beautiful thing... was illegal in almost every state a decade ago,” Bates told the New Hampshire Sunday News last month.

“It’s astounding the degree to which the homosexuals have been able to shift the sentiments of our society.”

“The primary purpose of this bill is to return our statutes back to the true meaning of ‘marriage’.”

Although Governor John Lynch (D) has promised to veto the bill, the state currently has a veto-proof Republican majority in both the State House of Representatives and Senate. Republican Party loyalties are divided by some of the representatives’ libertarian policies.

Republicans are also concerned about public opinion, which has favored the samesex marriage law. A University of New Hampshire poll of state residents last month found that 59 percent of respondents were somewhat or strongly opposed to repealing same-sex marriage.

But it remains to be seen if a veto override, which would require a two-thirds majority in both houses, would actually be possible.

“I know for a fact, based on people I’ve talked to, that if Governor Lynch vetoes it, that veto is not override-able,” Rep. Seth Cohn (R) told the Concord Monitor.

For example, Rep. Andrew Manuse (R), said in an email to the New York Times that he would oppose the repeal because it was “using its power to redefine a religious, social, and societal institution.”

The news that New Hampshire might reverse its previous legislation was followed by the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Maryland, where Governor Martin O’Malley signed the bill into law March 1.

The New Hampshire law, which was passed in 2009, makes the state one of eight states — Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Maryland, and the District of Columbia — which currently allow same-sex marriage. Over 30 other states have already enacted bans limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, and Minnesota and North Carolina are also considering bans this year.

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Illustration by Robert Sandler

W

e all know that money can’t buy love or happiness. Turns out there’s another thing money can’t buy: ethics. Studies conducted by Paul Piff et al. and published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, found that the wealthy were more likely than the poor to engage in unethical behaviors. These studies defined the rich as those who either reported high social economic status on the MacArthur Scale of Socioeconomic Status, or possessed items characteristic of the wealthy, like nice cars. In the experiments, these rich folk proved their nastiness again and again. One such experiment had two “coders,” or participants who didn’t know the hypothesis of the studies, watch for cars at intersections and see if they stopped at the four-way stop. The coders then recorded both the type of car, as well as its condition, which were later used in the study to determine socioeconomic status. The coders found that the drivers of more expensive cars were more likely to ignore a stop sign at an intersection then drivers of less expensive cars.

Another experiment asked129 university students to assess their socioeconomic status and then offered them candy from a jar marked “For children.”

The students who indicated a higher socioeconomic status were more likely to take greater amounts of candy.

These studies add to the growing pool of evidence that contradicts the stereotypical notion that poorer people tend to act unethically out of desperation.

Researchers at the Proceedings of National Academy of Science posit that these findings might be explained by the self-sufficiency and discretion of the wealthy.

Since, they hypothesize, wealthier people don’t need to rely on the community for resources as much as the poor, they do not feel the need to act as ethically in their community. A study by Northwestern University and the University of Chicago’s Adam Waytz and Nicholas Epley expands upon this explanation. Since the wealthy often have more beneficial social links than the poor, they do not feel the need to conform to certain ethical standards to gain new contacts, but are more likely to act maliciously towards others. Yet, the answer might be the even simpler explanation posited not only by Piff et al. but in literature and religion as well: the wealthy are more likely to “view greed in a more positive light,” an attribute that can contribute both to their success and to their ethical shortcomings.

Not every researcher agrees with the results of Piff ’s experiments. Bloomberg reports, for example, that researchers like Chatham University’s Meredith McGinley feel that the experiments were poorly designe, thereby leading to flawed data.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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Putin on the Fritz

by Barry Elkinton

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teary-eyed Vladimir Putin declared victory in the Russian presidential elections last Sunday, claiming 64 percent of the vote. After Putin’s four years as Prime Minister beside outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, the two leaders are set to swap jobs—Putin will return to the presidency, while Medvedev will become Prime Minister. Embattled by recent protests calling for his ouster, Putin struck a defiant tone while addressing supporters gathered in Moscow’s Manzeh Square. “We have won an open and honest struggle,” said Putin. “Glory to Russia!”

International election observers and opposition leaders have highlighted numerous instances of fraud and tampering executed by Putin’s campaign. Reports of Putin supporters being bussed around to vote at multiple locations are widespread. In some regions, the results alone are enough to raise eyebrows. The fact that Putin somehow managed to receive 99.82 percent of the vote in Chechnya, for example—the region that Putin viciously subdued during the Second Chechen War—certainly seems suspicious, if not downright impossible.

Nonetheless, no one disputes that Putin decisively won the contest, even if the final tally was considerably inflated. Putin’s nearest challenger, communist Gennady Zyuganov, received a mere 17 percent of the vote, while billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov came in third with a distant 8 percent. “[Putin] may in some ways be authoritarian, but he actually enjoys a degree of legitimacy,” Stephen Jones, professor of political science at Mount Holyoke College, told the Independent. “Despite the violations at the polling booth, probably 60 percent of the population really supports him.”

Of course, Putin’s tight control over the media and strategic use of the state’s resources to support his own campaign also played a part in his success. Moreover, years of state-sponsored suppression have prevented the formation of any meaningful opposition party. The case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil tycoon and liberal dissident who has spent the last decade in a Siberian jail on dubious charges, is only the most egregious example

of the measures Putin has taken to stifle any potential challengers. “If you described [Russia] as democracy, it would be on the very low end of the spectrum,” said Jones.

In fact, it is widely believed that the only candidates allowed to challenge Putin in the election do so with the Kremlin’s tacit consent. Needless to say, these candidates tend to be weak and uninspiring. “Voting yesterday I felt like I was choosing the least dirty toilet in a crowded train station,” a disenchanted voter told Reuters.

Putin’s return to the presidency fulfills a longstanding strategy to maintain the politician’s firm control over power in Russia.

After eight years, constitutionally mandated term limits prevented Putin from seeking a third term in 2008. In a calculated move, Putin then endorsed the candidacy of his protégé Medvedev, who won election in a landslide, and promptly named Putin Prime Minister. Putin became constitutionally eligible to run again this year. Further constitutional changes ratified under Medvedev have extended presidential term lengths to six years, meaning Putin will be president until 2018, and potentially 2024 should he stand for reelection.

But the Russia of today bears little resemblance to the country that greeted Putin twelve years ago. The 1990s were characterized by unrest and corruption as Russia struggled to rebuild itself after the fall of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, promised liberal reforms but struggled to match rhetoric with results. Instead, Russians watched in dismay as Yeltsin allowed a group of oligarchs to become fabulously wealthy through the rapid privatization of state assets. His apparent drinking problem has not helped his legacy either. “Yeltsin was a reformer, but as far as Russians were concerned, he discredited the word ‘reform’,” said Jones. When he left office in 1999, Yeltsin’s approval rating hovered around six percent Putin’s KGB credentials and tough guy image proved the perfect antidote to the uncertain leadership and economic

instability of the Yeltsin years. With the help of the obedient Russian media, Putin has proven adept at shaping his own domestic reputation. Although Westerners have mocked Putin’s penchant for blatantly choreographed photo ops—such as when Putin tranquilized a tiger, or shot a whale with a crossbow—these images have resonated in the machismo of Russian political culture. Moreover, Putin has backed up this reputation by pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, rebuilding the military, and butting heads with Western leaders.

Most importantly, Putin has overseen a massive economic revival in Russia, and this remains his greatest legacy thus far.

Driven by rising oil and gas prices, Russian GDP grew dramatically during Putin’s first two terms, and Putin skillfully made sure that the whole country benefited from these revenues. In turn, average Russian salaries went from $80 a month to $640 during Putin’s presidency, and the ranks of the middle class swelled. “People are doing better on the whole, and more people are employed,” said Jones. “A lot of people are saying, ‘I’ve actually done quite well under Putin’.”

In early December, following a round of blatantly rigged legislative elections, Russians protested in streets by the thousands, and effectively shattered Putin’s veil of invincibility. While the corrupt election served as the catalyst for the protests, the growth of these demonstrations signals a wider discontent with Putin’s heavy-handed rule. Most significantly, the vast majority of protesters are educated and solidly middle class. But if Putin created the middle class, why are these people now calling for his ouster?

Herein lies what will likely be remembered as the great paradox of Putin’s legacy—Putin created the Russian middle class, but in doing so, he likely sealed his own fate. Quite simply, Putin served a valuable purpose during his first two terms in stabilizing the country, but his future usefulness appears to be limited. To a middle class with growing access to education

and travel, the Putin who tranquilizes tigers and bends iron with his bare hands is increasingly met with laughter rather than admiration. As for the Putin who jails opponents and rigs elections—well, that’s no laughing matter. “He created a class of people who have higher expectations of the political system, are more educated, and are waiting to move to the next stage,” said Jones. “It’s going to be a much rougher ride for him.”

Going forward, Putin faces a serious dilemma. He knows that he has to institute economic and political reforms to quell unrest, but significant reform carries the potential to undermine his own power.

“He can’t open up the system too much, because then he may become a victim of those reforms,” said Jones. Given his legacy of corruption, it’s not out of the question that Putin might stand trial for his misdeeds in the future. Given Putin’s strong personal incentives to delay reform, it’s difficult to imagine him satisfying the demands of the middle class.

Ultimately, although Putin’s victory was a foregone conclusion, he will likely face future challenges to his legitimacy outside of the ballot box. Nonetheless, there was one surprise on election night­—Putin’s tears.

While choked-up moments have a long history in American politics, Russians didn’t seem to know what to make of this rare display of emotion. Have the recent protests rattled the normally aloof leader? Or was this a calculated trick to appear genuine during a tainted victory?

Later in the evening, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov issued a statement to clear up any doubt on the matter: “Tears in Putin’s eyes seen by millions on national TV during his speech at a rally last night were caused not by the emotion of victory, but by the wind.” Whether those were the winds of change remains to be seen.

BARRY ELKINTON B’13 shoots whales with crossbows.

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science

9 march 2012

ABNORMAL APTITUDES The Genetics of Academic Disposition

by Greg Sewitz Illustration by Timothy Nassau

A

new study by Princeton professors Benjamin Campbell and Samuel Wang probes the biological nature of what people love to learn. They are looking for a link between intellectual discipline, measured by intended academic major, and genetic disorder. Campbell and Wang surveyed 1,077 students from the incoming Princeton freshman class of 2014, asking for intended academic major and a history of familial genetic and mental dysfunction. Of the students that responded, 527 indicated a technical major in the natural sciences, engineering, or mathematics, and 394 indicated nontechnical majors in the social sciences or humanities.

The surveys found that students in technical fields were three times as likely as nontechnical students to have a sibling with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and twice as likely as the national average.

Alternatively, humanities students were three times as likely to have a family member who has suffered from substance abuse, major depression, or bipolar disorder.

To be sure, Princeton’s student body is uncharacteristically biased towards middle and upper classes, for whom instances of mental disorder are diagnosed at a higher rate than the general population; Princeton students, then, are perhaps more likely to have a sibling with any disorder simply because it is less likely anything would go undiagnosed. Environmental factors could also contribute to the relationship: since siblings spend a lot of time around each other, an intense inclination of one sibling towards a certain mental state—emotional, rational, or anything in between—would naturally influence other members of the family. However, the correlation effect is too large for this to be the only explanation.

For each student, Campbell and Wang created a “predisposition for subject matter” score by calculating the types of mental disorder present in their families.

Each sibling with an affective disorder, such as bipolar disorder or depression,

was worth one point, and each sibling with an Autism Spectrum Disorder meant a negative point. This resulted in a range of scores, where having siblings who all have autism disorders means the most negative value possible, and having siblings who all have affective disorders the most positive. Using a categorization of intellectual interests that groups students into broad categories of science/technology/ engineering/mathematics, social sciences, and the humanities along an axis, each student’s intended academic major could be predicted with incredible accuracy just from information about a variety of familial disorders. Intellectual interest could be forecasted using math so simple it can be done on one hand.

The idea of the tragic, troubled artist has been embedded in our cultural mythos for millennia. Ever since Aristotle declared that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia,” this narrative has persisted. The list goes on: Van Gogh sliced his ear off in a fit of bipolar depression; Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex, coat pockets weighed down with stone; Kurt Cobain shot himself with a shotgun. Mental disorder runs as a constant through the humanistic canon.

In the sciences there is a similar pattern, albeit of a different nature: whereas previous studies have shown that full-time artists and writers suffer from affective-emotional conditions much more frequently than do control subjects, most cases of dysfunction found in the technical disciplines are Autism Spectrum Disorders. The Autism Spectrum is often used to describe developmental disorders that usually appear in the first three years of life. All the disorders on the spectrum, of which autism and Asperger Syndrome are the most common, are characterized by social deficits and impaired communication.

Autism is strongly genetic, but the link between brain and behavior is still up for debate. One of the most popular theories, first proposed by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, is that autism is caused by an imbalance on the Empathizing-Systemizing Scale, which classifies people based on their scores along two axes: strength of interest in empathy and strength of interest in systems. While females generally score higher in empathizing than systemizing and males generally score the reverse, autistic individuals usually fall significantly more on the systemizing end of the scale, no matter the gender. One explanation for the frequency of the trend of autism in the technical disciplines, then, is that a personality inclined towards systemizing would be successful in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics, since they are all highly ordered fields.

What Campbell and Wang’s research suggests is that there is a definite and statistically significant relationship between genes and intellectual interest; since we share on average 50 percent of our genes with our siblings, it is the genetic code that best explains what grants one sibling a mental disorder and another an academic passion.

And while it isn’t that surprising that individuals suffering from affective disorders are attracted to the arts—previous studies have found that subjects in a mildly manic state think more fluidly and originally—or that autistic individuals show a greater preference for highly standardized pursuits, it is surprising that siblings who display no symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorder are also drawn to the propensities of their fellow family members. Campbell and Wang hypothesize that this occurrence is probably due to the presence of an inherited phenotype—a displayed trait resulting from the interaction of genes and the environment. The genetic variation between close relatives establishes a continuous scale of the phenotype, with one end yielding only

theoretical interest and the other causing dysfunction. The researchers speculate, for example, that there is a phenotype of emotional lability that corresponds to an enthusiasm for the humanities in milder forms and affective disorder in the extreme.

The notion that a person would find interests that made use of and allowed release from their individual conditions seems intuitive. What isn’t explicit is the degree to which the disorder and the discipline are connected. In other words: are our personal passions produced by our proteins? And if they are, does that prove that the sciences and the arts are fundamentally distinct? Recent research has disproved the traditional conception of the humanities and the sciences as belonging to separate hemispheres of the brain; both the right and left hemispheres mostly work in parallel at the level of processes.

But this does not mean that there aren’t isolated networks that give rise to distinct pursuits, nor does it delegitimize the fact that we might be programmed to feel more interested in some fields over others.

Zooming in to the molecular level might be a more promising way to locate the physical correlates of each skillset, and the code that is responsible for our intellectual dispositions.

Traits, temperament, and interests all begin to develop around the same time early in life, suggesting that they share a sizeable proportion of developmental genes.

These findings paint a picture of academic interest as another potentially inheritable trait in the long list of genetic determinants passed down from our parents before us.

Our mental pursuits may be predicted by the building blocks of our bodies: we might literally be what we learn.

GREG SEWITZ B’13 forecasted your interests by plugging in your family’s psychopathology.

6

interviews

“D

o you want a Hitler mustache?”

Such was the offering to attendees of a political festival in Sweden last summer, where protestors handed out small pieces of black tape to call attention to the Sweden Democrats and the party’s controversial policies.

Since their founding in 1988, the Sweden Democrats have pledged to tighten the country’s borders and preserve a Swedish ethnic identity. They have promised to drastically reduce the number of immigrants and asylum seekers coming to Sweden and require those who do immigrate to adopt Swedish language, culture, and values.

The Sweden Democrats were originally supported by the margins of Swedish society—including Swedish ‘skinheads’— and were excluded from mainstream politics.

But in recent years, the party has become more polished and professional, facilitating an increase in its electoral success. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats entered the national parliament for the first time, receiving 5.7 percent of the vote and a proportional 20 seats in the 349 seat Swedish Riksdag.

The Independent traveled to Sweden to interview members of the Sweden Democrats and their opponents in an effort to understand the party’s immigration policies and the motivations behind them.

Richard Jumshof is one of the Sweden Democrat’s Members of Parliament, where he sits on the Committee on Education.

He has been involved with the Sweden Democrats since 1999 and is comfortable speaking on behalf of the party.

The Independent: Do you have a slogan, or a succinct way that you describe your policy on immigration?

Richard Jumshof: Maybe “Swedes First.” A

9 march 2012

lot of members of the Sweden Democrats have foreign roots. My grandparents came from Finland as migrant workers in the ‘60s. I still think that there are too many foreigners in Sweden, even if I do have those roots.

Sweden is quite a unique country.

I’ve been to the States a few times, and I like the United States, but in many ways I think Sweden is better because here you have healthcare, you have good schools for everyone. We should keep it that way. We have problems today with a lot of people coming to Sweden and they don’t get any work. Of course, if they don’t have any jobs, it costs [the government] a lot of money. So, “Swedes First.”

Indy: Is there a way to change the system so that immigrants can come to Sweden and get jobs more easily?

RJ: When I was a teenager in the ‘80s, I was very liberal. I actually believed in a system where people can come here when they want. Shut down the borders, we don’t need them. But today I realize that was quite a naïve approach because it does not work that way. If we want to keep Sweden as it is then we can’t let anyone come to Sweden. The costs are too high.

Today we have a lot of problems with quite a lot of Muslims coming to Sweden. I think Islam is both a strange and dangerous religion. In many ways it’s quite the opposite of Christian values. That for me is one of my main issues.

Indy: Can you elaborate on that? What does Islam represent and why is that dangerous?

RJ: When I judge a religion, of course I have to judge what they say, but I also have to go to the roots. When I judge Christianity, I have to go to the roots, I have to go to Jesus. What did he do? What did he say? He

seemed to be quite a nice person. If he lived today he would be a modern hippie.

But when I look at Islam, when it comes to Muhammad, he’s quite the opposite. They say that it’s the same God, but how can it be? For me it is like if someone should build a religion around Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot. It’s totally stupid.

How can you look up to a person like that?

Indy: Has Sweden actually had problems with Muslims engaging in violence?

RJ: We have a lot of issues when it comes to youngsters doing criminal activity.

Indy: And you attribute that to their religion?

RJ: In some way, [and] to culture as well. A lot of people who came to Sweden over the past twenty years from Africa and from the Middle East say “I’m not Swedish; I do not want to be part of that society.” If you don’t want to be part of that society, how can you make this society better?

If you don’t want to be part of this country, I think you should actually move back. I really don’t care about the color of skin. It’s about values to me. You can’t base a society on skin color but you have to base it on something. And for me, that’s values.

Björn Söder has worked with Jumshof for nearly a dozen years. Söder is a Member of Parliament for the Sweden Democrats and also serves as the party’s Press Secretary.

Indy: How did you first get involved with the Sweden Democrats?

Björn Söder: I had a daughter born [in] 2000. You start looking around; what are you giving to your children when you die? And then I called the party. I had been interested

in the party before, but the media picture of the party was a bit frightening. But if you read the political programs and listen[ed] to the political programs, it was not that bad.

Indy: Has the media’s image of the Sweden Democrats changed since 2000?

BS: Not as much as I’d prefer. I’d say we are actually in the level where they can admit that we are humans. Before, it was not unusual that we were called lice or cockroaches in the standard news media.

Indy: My understanding is that the bias and stigma against the party came from early members who were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations.

BS: Of course they are to blame for their behavior and the way they dress and their views, but I think if you do a fair summary of the party from 1988 to now, you would see that represents [only] a few percent. I look at those guys as confused morons, but they have been used as tools in order to talk bad about everything else that has been done.

Indy: Other parties in Sweden have questionable pasts as well, right?

BS: With all parties, if you go way back to the Second World War, everyone did things that they are not proud of. And I don’t think they should be blamed for that either.

We have problems today, as all parties have, but I think our problem is in some way larger because of the fact that the media picture is so twisted…so people who are actually racist or radicals think this is the party for them because they read it in the paper. So of course they want to join us. This is a problem.

Indy: I understand that the other parties

the college hill independent

interviews

7

STOCKHOLM STIGMA Anti-Immigration Politics in Sweden

by Sarah Rutherford Illustration by Diane Zhou in Parliament have pledged not to speak to you or work with you. Do they uphold that pledge in reality?

BS: They are talking to us. And what we’ve noticed is that the tone of voice, the way they treat us is much, much better than we ever could have imagined. They really treat us like equals on a personal level. But when it comes to the voting chamber, where the decision is made, they never push a button for yes on a proposal that we have made. It might take a few more years until they do that, but they will.

Indy: When some of your peers joined the Sweden Democrats, it threatened their relationship with their family or friends. Did you have a similar experience?

BS: I have one sister who is politically engaged in a left wing party that’s more or less the one throwing stones at us at our outdoor meetings. She won’t talk to me at all; she won’t call; we aren’t friends on Facebook. Another sister who is younger also removed me from Facebook.

When we have family dinner, we have to have two. Me and my family and the siblings that I’m not enemies with, we [have] one. And then they [have] another for the ones who could not stand me.

Indy: And this is because…?

BS: It’s a social stigma in Sweden to be a Sweden Democrat.

In Sweden there is a policy that we don’t do any campaigning on Election Day. But on the morning of the 18th or 19th [Election Day in September, 2010], both big Swedish national papers had pictures on the front that “Today we are fighting inhumanity.” On one there was our voting bill and it was crinkled and put on the gutter with a few cigarettes around it and stamped on.

If you’re not into politics, of course you’re going to buy that propaganda. Of course you’re going to think that [a Sweden Democrat supporter] has gone mad, so let’s remove him from Facebook or from the phone list. When it happens, it feels of course not very good. But when you think of it, what kind of friend is it?

Paul Lappalainen immigrated to Sweden from America over thirty years ago and now heads Equality Promotion at the Swedish Equality Ombudsman, a governmental agency that enforces Sweden’s equality and anti-discrimination laws. Lappalainen is particularly focused on discrimination related to ethnicity and religion, which he says is the most common form of discrimination in Sweden.

Indy: Some people would try to explain immigrants’ high unemployment rates by saying that they don’t understand the language as well, or don’t have the skills that are necessary for Swedish employment. But you’re saying that those factors alone can’t explain the higher unemployment rates?

Paul Lappalainen: No. I was one of those unemployed during the ‘90s when I first got involved in local politics. I tended to be the only foreigner who ended up in certain types of meetings where we would discuss immigration policy or immigrants. And then I would hear twenty local politicians discussing “These people, they have to learn Swedish, and they have to stop living together out in certain areas, and they have to want to work.”

And finally when I got a chance to say something, I pointed out that I was at University at the time; I was also unemployed. I know a lot of foreigners who know much better Swedish than I do, they have two or three degrees from the Swedish universities. I didn’t know any of

them who said ,“I don’t want a job or I want to live out in Rinkeby [one of the poorest neighborhoods with a large immigrant population].”

People listened to me, looked at me, shook their heads, and went on to discuss, “Why aren’t these people learning Swedish?”

“Why don’t they want jobs?” The concept just didn’t fit into their way of thinking.

Because in their way of thinking, the whole idea was how can they fit in with us, not what kinds barriers are we setting up to keep them out, even when we invite them in.

Indy: Generally, do politicians in Sweden have good immigration policies?

PL: The things that they say don’t make sense. It has to do with immigrants—they are extremely weak politically. Fourteen percent of the population is born outside of the country. But, to a large extent, they’ve never been mobilized as a political force.

Indy: Let’s talk about the Sweden Democrats. Who supports their immigration policy?

PL: They are speaking to the part of the population that’s dissatisfied with the direction that Sweden is going. There’s some ideological support, people who hate immigrants. Then there’s another group that’s basically lower middle class, working class Swedes who have been affected by changing structure in Sweden. Industry has been shut down; certain types of workplaces don’t exist anymore. They feel that Sweden has received all of these refugees who are supposedly getting all this help, but they see themselves suffering. They think, “These people are getting help, what’s happened to me? What’s happened to the Sweden that I believed in 20, 30, 40 years ago? Why didn’t the politicians tell me they were going to change Sweden?”

Indy: Many Sweden Democrats say that when they joined the party, they were ostracized in many ways—shut out by family members, lost a lot of friends. Do you think they deserve that?

PL: I don’t think they’re that different from most people in society. They might have an overly romantic view of how Sweden once was. Sweden has never been the way that it’s imagined by Sweden Democrats and by most Swedes.

Indy: Is it wrong to call the Sweden Democrats a racist party?

PL: I don’t think it’s wrong to call them a racist party. What I think is wrong is to think that they’re the only party that has a problem with racism.

Indy: Do you think the established parties would lose voters if they confronted the Sweden Democrats, instead of pledging not to speak to them?

PL: Not if they are intelligent. But if they don’t admit that they themselves have been part of the problem—if they try to say that these are evil people, and they’re the root of the problem, as opposed to [the fact that] Sweden has its history of racism, discrimination, and the established parties have done quite little—then they might.

As far as I’m concerned, if one of the established parties dares to put equality and nondiscrimination on the table as a key issue, all the others will run over and say, “Me too.”

And they’ll start competing for who’s better at equality, and that’s actually what we need.

8 occult

9 march 2012

MULTIMODALIT Y Musings on Everyday Synesthesia, Brain Architecture, and the Metaphor

by Sandeep Nayak Illustration by Julieta Cardénas

I

magine the pre-Babel tongue in which every word was perfect vocal expression for the thing it named, the thing behind the play of appearances and shared illusions.

Following our race’s arrogance to the deity, so the story goes, our pillar was shattered and with it the language of Adam.

The Good Book compels us to decry the loss of this noumenal tongue for the communicative difficulties which ensued, yet we might instead laud the world’s linguistic diversity as a remarkable demonstration of our brains’ capabilities. In any case, the real devastation in the confusion of languages is that words became mechanisms of expression, rather than the magically expressive objects we feel them to be.

Another story goes that Cratylus, friend of Aristotle and lover of words, recognized this duplicitous quality of language and became so disillusioned that he gradually descended into lifelong muteness. I suppose in some way unknown to me this passes for wisdom, but in my own estimation the man was a fool. He need not have been so distraught. There are fortunately still extant elements of the pre-Babel speech in our contemporary languages.

SOUND SYMBOLISM: REMNANTS OF THE PRE-BABEL TONGUE OR BRAIN ARCHITECTURE? Shirou Kunihira of Loma Linda University in California presented American college students with Japanese antonym pairs and their English translations. Wide-Narrow, Sour-Sweet, Fat-Thin, for example. He found that using nothing but their ears and their instincts, the cohort could distinguish their meanings at rates significantly greater than chance (p < .01).

These findings suggest that there are non-arbitrary relations between a word’s sound and its semantics—that the sound of a word hints at its meaning. Lynne Nygaard of Emory University replicated Kunihira’s findings with other languages. Charting the phonetic qualities of all these antonym pairs, he unearthed an odd fact: across languages, similar descriptive words share phonological characteristics.

Thus words meaning big, or fast, or round on average show phonological consistencies across languages. Furthermore, these phonological features reliably predicted monolingual subjects’ judgments of these words’ meanings. Experientially, these words have a certain inner bigness or fastness or roundness to them, which allows even Americans to distinguish them from their antonyms above chance when experimentally prodded to do so. This cross-linguistic sound symbolism hints at non-arbitrary links between sound and meaning. Take that, de Saussure!

DEFINITELY BRAIN ARCHITECTURE This sound symbolism, being cross-cultural, can come from nowhere else but what we humans all share in common—that is, brain architecture. Furthermore, it inherently spans sense modalities in a not entirely intuitive way. For this reason, the existence of cross-modal, non-arbitrary sound symbolism can shed light on the evolution of language.

To demonstrate this concretely, two shapes:

One is named Kiki and the other Bouba.

You should have been able to guess which was which (regardless of your native tongue).

To explain why, we must delve into the wrinkles of grey matter that fill the skull, to a region called the Left Angular Gyrus. This valuable cortical device plays an important role, being at the crossroads of centers for processing vision, hearing and touch. It integrates these various senses and presents them to our consciousness in a cohesive way.

Thus, it might be illuminating to examine what goes awry when lesions muck up this region’s functioning.

One neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran, did just that. He gathered four patients with speech aphasia and asked them to identify Kiki from Bouba. They could not do it.

Neither could these subjects grasp any but the literal meanings of metaphors. To them, reaching for the stars was a conceivable yet futile task. The proverb “the grass is always greener” struck them as sheer fallacy. Clearly, then, the Kiki/Bouba effect is grounded in multimodal integration in the brain, and plausibly metaphors are too. This would mean that metaphors are not merely linguistic quirks, or tricks of word play, but actually reflect the integration of different senses at the neural level. One cannot think Kiki/ Bouba away; it is a function of our brain architecture and it forcefully raises the question of how multimodal integration might structure our cognition in other fundamental ways.

Ramachandran then engaged this question with another question. At the whiff of some rotting odor, he reasoned, we primates scrunch our faces in disgust. This is quite a natural response, and perhaps conveys to the community at large that this substance is distasteful, maybe poisonous (avoid it!).

But then, he notes, cross-culturally, humans reacting to “disgusting” behaviors contort their faces in the same fashion as they would with despoiled food. The burning questions: why is the physiological disgust reaction the same as the social one? Furthermore, this is reflected in human speech the world round.

In metaphor so implicit as to be unnoticed, languages—even those entirely unrelated to each other—often refer to sordid individuals engaged in immoral behavior as disgusting, or rotten. The existence of this metaphor hints at a universal explanation, to be found in brain structure. Ramachandran speculates that the orbito-frontal cortex, which handles disgust from the nose and tongue, also manages moral disgust. If this is true, then perhaps the icky we feel at the mention of pederasty stems from the need to avoid food poisoning.

Kiki and Bouba do not make sense, except from the perspective of multimodal cognition. I have quizzed people of different philosophical stripes on these shapes, even

nihilists, and they all fit the pattern. I then ask them why. Postmodernists hastily refer to culture. They might say: “Do not our K’s have the angles of Kiki’s starburst? And does not the circle of the O and the oblongity of the U mimic Bouba’s roundness?” When I query general responders as to why they pick certain chapes, they say “Well, Bouba sounds rounder, and Kiki sounds sharper.”

Ramachandran thinks the effect might come about from the fact that these shapes mimic the ones our mouths take in making them. In saying Bouba, the labia orbiculates, and with Kiki, the tongue adopts angular formations on the palate. But to stick with the main point: vision, sound, and proprioception, the conscious experiences of which are vastly different and generally do not seem to bleed into each other are actually deeply and unconsciously linked in our brains in ways that fundamentally structure consciousness. Because of this, “Kiki” can sound sharp in a way that can be drawn, and “Bouba” can sound round. Very similar multimodal connections in the brain might be responsible for the capacity for metaphorical thinking, as evidenced by the fact that a single lesion can impair the ability to do both.

It has been asserted that metaphors arising from embodied experience fundamentally structure the way we think culturally. However, insights from the neuroscience of cross-modal cognition hint that cognition itself might be inherently metaphorical from the start—that even a single moment of thought presupposes a synthesis and integration of different sense modalities.

SANDEEP NAYAK B’12 eats papist babes.

vs.

flânerie

flan

identifying as hipster Gillian Brassil Chris Cohen Taylor Kelley

Steak ‘n Shake

wake ‘n’ bake

“it is what it is”

“at the same damn time”

Ash Ketchum

Toms

identifying as cat

Scrappy Doo

Y2K

Peeps

Teach Me How to Dougie

B2K

What Would Missy Elliott Do

full heart

Doug theme song

Air Bud

clear eyes

love in this club

love in a hopeless place

WINNER

vs.

fertilized

fried

strip club

Babysitters Club

areolas

MARCH MADNESS

Soulja Boy

Hanukkah

aurora borealis

La-Z-Boy

Shark Week

CASH RULES

O

Gambling Taxes, Narragansetts, and the Politics of Casinos in Rhode Island

by Jonathan Storch

n Tuesday, March 6, the Rhode Island House of Representatives voted 69 to 3 in favor of Newport Grand Slots’ request for a statewide referendum to permit it to begin hosting table games, an expansion of the so-called “slot parlor” into a full-fledged casino. The vote is the latest in a series of regional developments following last fall’s enactment of a law authorizing the construction of three new casinos in Massachusetts, casinos that Rhode Island legislators fear will draw significant numbers of gamers away from the state’s own gambling destinations, the Newport Grand and Lincoln’s Twin River.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed amending his state’s constitution to legalize table games; here, a referendum to expand the Twin River, which just emerged from bankruptcy last fall, is already on the ballot for this November. Among the states affected by the Massachusetts law, Rhode Island lawmakers have particular cause to be worried: with Rhode Island currently bringing in the most tax dollars per capita from gambling of any state in the country— in 2011, $293.5 million or almost 10 percent of total revenue from slots alone—the cashstrapped state is not in a position to have its gamblers take their money elsewhere.

Recent years have seen several attempts to bring casino gambling to Rhode Island, but without the economic pressure of neighboring competition, none have succeeded. In 2009 and 2010, then-Governor Donald Carcieri opposed legislation that would have put the expansion of the Newport Grand and Twin River to voters, vetoing a 2010 bill after it passed both houses of the legislature. But most significant was voters’ 2006 rejection of a referendum that would have amended the State Constitution to allow the Narragansett Indians to contract with Las Vegas–based Harrah’s for the opening of a casino in West Warwick.

Elsewhere in the country, local sovereignty permits Indian tribes the discretion to host casinos on their own land. But the peculiar legal status of the Narragansett’s so-called settlement lands—1,800 acres in Charlestown that federal law transferred back to the Narragansett in 1978—has given legislators a means to prevent the tribe from doing so. According to the 1996 Chafee Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress, “settlement lands” don’t have the prerogatives of “Indian lands” for the purposes of gaming regulation. As a 2007 report from the Center for Policy Analysis at UMass-Dartmouth notes, the only tribe that the Chafee Amendment affects is the Narragansett.

In 2004, the Rhode Island legislature granted statewide referendum for the

Narragansett’s proposal to open a Harrah’s casino outside the provision of federal Indian gaming law. But the State Supreme Court took the measure up before it even made it to the ballot. The State Constitution maintains that gambling in Rhode Island must be operated by the state, and although the 2004 referendum would have given the state extensive regulatory authority over the casino, the act’s specific language proposed that the casino be “operated by an Affiliate of Harrah’s Entertainment.” The court ruled the distinction between regulation and operation to be constitutionally significant, and threw the referendum out.

The 2006 referendum was explicitly designed to get around the court’s ruling. If passed, it would have added a section to the State Constitution declaring the legality of a second referendum for the Narragansetts’ bid to open a “privately owned and privately operated” casino. After initial approval by both houses of the state legislature, the amendment was the subject of heated public debate and huge advertising expenditures in the months leading up to the vote.

Harrah’s-funded Rhode Islanders for Jobs and Tax Relief campaigned in its support, while a group named Save Our State (SOS), supported by numerous organizations— including the Providence Foundation and the Rhode Island Council of Churches— formed to lead the charge against it.

The contest was acrimonious from the start. In June, SOS leader Richard Oster accused Harrah’s of attempting “to use the tears in the eyes for the Indians as a pawn;” Narragansett Chie f Sachem Matthew Thomas accused Oster of racism in a reply.

For many voters trying to get a handle on the proposal, the major issue was the money, but studies on the casino’s projected economic effects yielded wildly different results: the SOS-supporting Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council predicted a $1.1 billion decrease in state revenue over ten years, while Rhode Islanders for Jobs and Tax Relief called the RIPEC study a “sham” and, in its own study, forecasted millions in revenue gains and the creation of 3,800 new jobs.

As for advertising, by the time the amendment flopped by a nearly two-thirds margin in November, the Providence Journal reported that Harrah’s had spent almost $18 million, while SOS had spent $4 million— with more than three-quarters of the SOS money coming from the Twin River (then called Lincoln Park) and the Newport Grand.

Since 2006, Narragansett leaders have continued to lobby for their own casino without success­—so they’re perplexed at the recent support for table games in

Lincoln and Newport. The tribe is already challenging the constitutionality of the Twin River proposal in court. “Our language back in 2004 and 2006 was virtually identical to the legislation that the General Assembly just passed, and the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional,” Chief Sachem Thomas said in an email. “We don’t understand how the language proposed this year is any different.” But the language is, in fact, different: the Twin River proposal specifies that “the state . . . shall have full operational control to operate the foregoing facility” [emphasis added]. The distinction between operation and regulation was the major issue in the 2004 ruling, so although a Twin River casino might be unfair, the proposal itself appears to be constitutionally acceptable.

But there might be a bigger problem elsewhere. Last week, Attorney General Peter Kilmartin brought forward regulatory legislation to accompany the Twin River expansion, legislation that would give the state Division of Lottery the authority to “grant licenses” to outside entities allowing them to “engage in . . . casino gaming operations regulated by this chapter”—a description that sounds a whole lot like the “delegation of operational control . . . to a private company” that the 2006 court ruled unconstitutional. “It does look to me like state officials are trying to do an end run around the Rhode Island Constitution,” said Clyde Barrow of the Center for Policy Analysis, who predicted that the issue would end up in court.

For his part, Governor Lincoln Chafee hasn’t yet said whether he supports expansion of the slot parlors. A study commissioned by his office reported in January that even with the addition of table games, the state’s yearly gambling revenue is likely to decrease by $59 million after the Massachusetts casinos open in a few years; without table games, it’s projected to fall $75 million. Last week, Kilmartin filed a motion to quash the Narragansett’s Twin River suit, and if both referendums do end up on the ballot, then the prospect of a $16 million revenue loss to Massachusetts is likely to be persuasive to voters come November.

Whatever the result, at least one thing looks certain: Rhode Island’s budget is in for another hit.

JONATHAN STORCH B’14 is a crapshoot.

Illustrations

by Robert Sandler

EVERYTHING G

et to know the name Sheldon Adelson if casinos have you worried. Recently, he’s been nothing short of Viagra for Newt Gingrich’s struggling presidential campaign, contributing $15 million to Winning Our Future, the pro-Gingrich Super PAC. He ranks eighth on Forbes’ list of richest Americans thanks to his $21.5 billion fortune in the casino industry. But all you need to know about him is that his archenemy—Mickey Mouse—warring with him over casino expansion in South Florida.

For years, Adelson has lobbied unsuccessfully to bring his Las Vegas Sands empire to South Beach and dethrone Disney World as the top commercial attraction in the state. On February 2, a bill narrowly failed the Florida State Legislature that would have legalized casino gambling beyond Indian reservations, and paved the way for Adelson to break ground. He says he wants to spend $4 billion on two casino resorts, produce thousands of jobs for Miami-Dade county, and provide a tax revenue stream—estimated to be $400 million over the first four years—that could help ease the state’s $3.75 billion debt crisis.

The incentive to support casinos seems obvious for some politicians. “I believe that any legislator that is opposed to building resort casinos which will create thousands of jobs in South Florida should be given the title of Job Killing Czar,” Everett Wilkinson, Chairman of the South Florida Tea Party, wrote once the bill failed. Florida is in dire need of jobs and a boon for its balance sheets. The same can be said of Rhode Island and other states—Illinois, New York, Massachusetts included—considering casino expansion.

The Shallow Economics of the Casino Industry

by Malcolm Burnley The numbers seem seductive: a billionaire flaunting ten-figure sums in start-up money and promising 40,000 jobs.

Are lawmakers playing with House money?

In Florida, it seems that if Adelson wins, the state wins; if his casinos bottom out, he loses. Governor Rick Scott and Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado—both of whom originally opposed legalizing casinos on non-reservation property—now endorse expansion. They see “destination” casinos as a no-brainer addition to Florida’s downtrodden economy, which has a 10 percent unemployment rate.

But the stalwarts of Florida’s economy disagree, saying gambling is parasitic to other sectors. “It is inconsistent with Florida’s brand as a family-friendly destination and with the efforts we’ve long supported to diversify Florida’s economy through research, innovation and entrepreneurship,” Mike Griffin, a spokesman for Walt Disney, argued.

Joining Mickey are The Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Retail Federation, and the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association—the state’s current high-rollers. “The expansion of gambling will do nothing but harm existing businesses, especially in the hospitality industry,’’ Richard Turner of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association has said. “There are only so many discretionary dollars to be spent.”

So are casinos real economic engines, or are they just poachers on established tourism? Disney World provides 60,000 jobs and $600 million in taxes to the state already, better than the best projections for casinos. Would a wholesome brand of family

tourism be sacrificed in pursuit of casino profits?

Casinos pay $7.6 billion in taxes to local and state governments, but there’s reason to worry that the industry is eroding nationwide. The two largest conglomerates in Las Vegas, MGM and Las Vegas Sands, barely survived the recession, and the third largest—Station Casinos—filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009. Donald Trump’s three Atlantic City establishments—the Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, and Trump Marina Hotel Casino—filed for Chapter 11 and have been sold. And New England’s two once-shining bastions of gambling, Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods have seen revenues drop by 10 percent yearto-year since 2007.

Even Adelson’s empire teetered on bankruptcy during the recession, as gambling profits were devastated by shrinking discretionary income. The downturn dispelled the myth that casinos are recession-proof: people don’t risk more when they have less. Shares of Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands dropped 99 percent between 2007 and 2009, from $145 to $1.50 per share. The Las Vegas Sun blamed the downfall on “a combination of factors: bad luck, bad corporate blood and hubris.”

It’d be betting on hubris for politicians to seek fiscal solvency through gambling.

Just look at Nevada as a worst-case scenario of why government shouldn’t buddy-up with casinos. The state went from boom to bust because of an over-reliance on gambling tax revenue. In the early-2000s, thriving casinos helped raise property values throughout the state, growing the tax rolls indirectly in addition to their direct cash payments.

But since the recession, casinos have struggled and left surrounding propertyowners with an inflated real estate bubble in which nobody is buying. Fifty percent of homeowners are under water and 12.7% of Nevadans are unemployed. The Brookings Institute recently named Las Vegas its “most miserable” city in the country.

Las Vegas is a cautionary tale for other states. Massachusetts approved a bill last fall to create three separate resort casinos at undecided locations—Foxborough and East Boston are two possibilities—where the state will collect 25 percent of the revenue at each. Not to be outdone, New Hampshire has pushed for a bill legalizing four resort casinos. And Rhode Island is voting in November on whether or not to expand its slot parlors to allow table games as well.

In a Miami Herald poll taken in January, Florida voters were split 44-42 percent in opposition to legalizing casino gambling.

But they voted overwhelmingly—81 percent—to put the question to a referendum vote, suggesting that the population, not politicians or lobbyists, should decide how much appetite exists for expanded gambling. However, the supposed beneficiaries of expanding casinos—average taxpayers—are often the same people exploited by casinos to raise revenue.

The moral argument against casinos is less convincing than their shallow economics. Signs point to stagnant profits and a saturated industry. If Mickey Mouse is worried about casinos in his back yard, maybe you should be, too.

MALCOLM BURNLEY B ‘12 steers clear of parasites.

A FRIDAY NIGHT AT

by David Adler

T

he Twin River New England Gambling Casino in Lincoln, RI is not a casino.

There are no tables for poker or blackjack. There are no cards, no high stakes, no high rollers. Instead, gambling is solitary; rows and rows of screens stretch on endlessly through the windowless complex, with over 4,700 individual gambling machines.

“Aztec Temple;” “Five Times Way;” “Triple Diamond”—tens of different variations on the traditional slot machine. “This one is my favorite,” I hear a blonde in sweatpants tell her friend, putting down her Bud Light and ashtray in front of a slot machine. “It’s a winner every time.”

She is making her way off of the dancefloor, where an eight-piece band covers Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” In front of them, a motley crowd bumps and grinds to the music. This is one half of Twin River’s demographic, clubgoers for whom the gambling is a mere bonus. A short, muscular man with a ponytail sizes up a young brunette drinking a cocktail glowing rainbow neon across the bar. Three bachelors, heavily gelled and cologned, discuss their prospects, index fingers pointed toward the dance floor like team captains picking the dodgeball squad. A number of old men are dancing alone, brought here under varied circumstances: a conference with corporate, a weekend away from the wife, or maybe just a pit stop between work and home. This is

not “destination gambling,” a phrase used by the casino industry to describe places like Vegas whose draw is a weekend away from home. Conveniently located just outside Providence and without a hotel attached, this is “convenience gambling.”

Lee, 73, is standing with a group of older women, trying to wrangle them into one last dance. They say they have to be getting home, and he swings his arms out with a “come on!” He looks a lot like the old man from those Six Flags commercials— jowly and slightly shrunken, but impressively mobile and excited to be here. Lee’s a Twin Rivers regular. “They love me here,” he says with a laugh. “I’m always getting invited to get up on stage, and you know, with the Michael Jackson songs”—he points to his black fedora on the table next to him—“I’m just a big hit.” He does his moonwalk and grabs his pelvis.

Even on a Friday night, Twin River is only about half full. Much of the activity is concentrated in that club arena of the smoking-section, which features a variety of New England decor—a statue of a lighthouse, wooden seagulls hanging down from the ceiling, lots of rope. Some people order food at the KFC, Taco Bell, and Johnny Rockets stations built in to the ground floor; others stand excitedly in front of a “Cinnabon (Coming Soon!)” sign.

The rest of the casino, one endless landscape of carpet and slot machines, is

much less populated. Here, gamblers sit on top of black leather stools and stare solemnly at the screen. Most hardly speak, moving between slot machine and cash machine every few minutes. Twin River is a 24/7 operation, and it is clear from the glaze of their eyes that most gamblers are deep into their third, fourth, or fifth hour. Cheerful jingles and the sounds of digital coins echo through the hall.

One married couple holds hands while they gamble. He is slouched back, his baseball cap resting on his protruding belly; she sits upright, her foot tapping the floor, her cigarette burning quickly. Both have their other hand resting on the button, placing a new bet whenever the last is over. They are playing a game called “Xtra REWARD,” where, the machine says, “the 3rd reel becomes 2 symbols in 1 reel.”

Vague game descriptions like this contribute to an overall feeling of confusion for non-gamblers. The rules are different for every game, and they are not posted in plain sight. You can choose to play 1, 5, 10, 15, or 20 lines; you can choose to have X1 bet, X2 bet, X5 or X10 bet. Meanwhile, your money is translated into a unit of “credits,” a number that seems to fluctuate at random but never fails to arrive at zero.

All the sounds that come from the machine are happy ones, so you never really know if you’ve won.

But for the regulars, the slots seem to

have their own logic. “There you go!” yells a man in a beanie standing behind the married couple. They, like everyone else in their row, are fixed forward, and refuse to offer advice as I sit down at the machine next to them. Within two minutes, my $10 has disappeared. Getting up to leave, the woman turns to give her advice. “You just gotta keep trying.”

DAVID ADLER B’14 is a winner every time.

12

news

9 march 2012

N E Z IN THE SUN A R B UV Tanning Beds are a Hot Button Issue

by Dana Reilly Illustration by Becca Levinson

T

wenty some years ago, Jason Neustadter, a student at Atlantic City High School, left the tanning salon with blistering pink skin. Growing up in a shore town, Neustadter aspired to the bronze physique of other body-builders. He used tanning beds for a little over a year, and loved the look of a “healthy tan”—a phrase he now considers an oxymoron.

In 2005, Neustadter was about to start a job as chief resident of radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital when he was diagnosed with melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. His lesion was in-situ, meaning curable by a wide surgical excision and, fortunately, was the most superficial type.

“I never had a blistering sunburn after a jog on the beach and my skin never smelled like burnt flesh after a morning on the boat.

In my opinion it was tanning beds, or rather my liberal use of them before the age of 18, that did this to me.”

Neustradter undergoes full body skin examinations every four months. “I still approach each visit with a combination of anxiety, fear and dread,” he said.

This month the Rhode Island General Assembly is hearing a bill that would ban the use of indoor tanning facilities by minors without a doctor’s prescription. An identical bill was passed by the Senate last year, but was never called to a vote in the House because of pressure from local salons in key representatives’ districts. A recent study published in the International Journal of Cancer found that compared to study

participants who had never used a tanning bed, the risk of melanoma was 41% higher for those who had; for those who reported more than ten lifetime sessions, the risk was almost doubled.

Sixteen other states are considering prohibiting minors under the age of 18 from using UV tanning beds; on January 1, California became the first state in the nation to enact the ban.

In Providence, where tanning salons outnumber McDonald’s restaurants five to one, the proposed legislation has public health officials facing off against tanning industry advocates. Supporting the ban are Providence public health officials like Senator Rhoda Perry, chairwoman for the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and the bill’s architect. Perry points to testimony like the World Health Organization’s 2009 recommendation that UV radiation found in tanning beds should be categorized as a class-one carcinogen, in the company of arsenic, tobacco, and hepatitis C. “This is a very important public health initiative,” said Perry in an interview.

“In the same sense that we have put in place laws that protect minors from smoking and alcohol and other harmful products, it’s about time we address this issue.”

Steve DeToy, a spokesman for the Rhode Island Medical Society, says the indoor tanning industry has been less than honest with the public: “The tanning industry for years used that ploy that it was a healthy way to get vitamin D.” In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission shut down an ad

campaign launched by the Indoor Tanning Association to defend its industry against mounting criticism. “They even promoted it for pregnant women who needed vitamin D,” said DeToy. “That was the argument that the Federal Trade Commission found, in a word, bogus.” Just as the FTC charged the cigarette industry with misleading and deceptive advertising in 1950, DeToy believes the FTC verdict has exposed the deception surrounding UV tanning.

Bob Simpson, owner of Sun Sational Tanning, thinks the comparison to tobacco is “completely ridiculous.” A self-described hippie, Simpson has owned the East Providence tanning salon for 17 years. He equates using tanning beds with lying out in the sun, though he does concede exposure to UV rays can increase the risk of skin cancer. “There’s a risk of skin cancer outside [too],” he said, “but nobody’s regulating the sun.” Simpson has a point: the sun is also classified a class-one carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

While he agrees that regulation is helpful for establishing safe industry standards, as in the case of sunlamps and protective eyewear, Simpson sees the bill as an example of government overreaching.

“What’s next… if you’re under 18 you can only go to the beach for half an hour?

Where does it stop?”

OCEAN STATE TANNING Juliana Walsh and Karson Dellerman, juniors at East Greenwich High School, only go to the salons for spray tans, a

requisite part of the beauty ritual for special events like prom. Juliana said she used to frequent the sun-beds at Exotic Tans, a salon near her high school, until her doctor told her to stop because a birthmark under her chin was a risk for melanoma.

Currently, the Rhode Island Department of Health requires parental consent before minors can tan in one of Providence’s 41 salons. But as with anything illicit, teenagers have found a way to work around the restriction. Leaning across the table outside Nordstrom’s Espresso Bar in Providence Place Mall, Juliana said if some girls’ parents won’t sign the consent form, they use other people’s memberships. Karson added that “a lot of people have fake IDs, so you can just show them that.”

TANNING THROUGH THE AGES The pressure to have a healthy glow extends beyond teenage girls. A bronzed complexion has become mandatory for stepping in front of a camera. The fad originated in the 1920s when Coco Chanel stepped off the Duke of Westminter’s yacht with a caramel tan.

Hollywood studios celebrated dark beauties, like Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth in all their Technicolor splendor, and cultivated the fashion for tanning. With the advent of indoor tanning in the late 1970s, the look associated with wealth and exoticism became available and affordable to the middle class. After the royal wedding in England last year, Debenhams (a large UK department store) attributed a spike of more than 200 percent in fake tanning product

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sales to Kate and Pippa’s bronze glow. In a press release, the store’s beauty director, Sarah Stern, remarked, “Streams of wannabe princesses have been flooding our store looking to achieve their healthy, groomed look.”

Joining the ranks of British royalty, the cast of Jersey Shore has recently brought tanning back into the spotlight. Last fall, Johnston, RI native Paul DelVecchio (more commonly known by his DJ moniker “Pauly D”) released his own brand of tanning lotions called Pauly D’s Sexy Swagg. Lined up on a shelf next to those of his Jersey Shore costars in Sun Sational Tanning (to name just one salon), Pauly D’s Sexy Swagg is packaged in a hot pink zebra striped bottle bedazzled by fake diamonds, with black cursive promoting its anti-aging and skin firming benefits. For dermatologists, the big worry is the revival of UV tanning beds, not the use of lotions or tinting creams to achieve color.

“TANOREXIA” DelVecchio admitted to suffering from “tanorexia” on the Tonight Show in early January. The term, coined in the last three or four years, describes an addiction to indoor tanning beds. “I have to hold a tan at all times,” he said. “If I don’t, I start hyperventilating, I start breaking out in cold sweats, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep.” After being deprived of his UV fix in Italy during Jersey

Shore’s fourth season, Delvicchio introduced a tanning spray to his line, called Bronze Beats, to ensure no one ever has to go without.

Despite the facetious nickname, “tanorexia” is real: several recent studies have suggested that UV light exposure is indeed addictive. As with any endorphin-producing activity, frequent use of tanning beds can create a bodily dependency.

Unsurprisingly, the habit has also been linked to underlying mood disorders.

Katherine Philips, a professor of psychiatry at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, says obsessive tanning can be a symptom of body dysmorphic disorder.

Still, Juliana and Karson say tanning is an obsession like going to the gym for some girls in their class. “A lot of people at our school go tanning,” Walsh said. “In the winter, people get so obsessed with not being pale.”

Dr. Lionel Bercovitch, the director of Pediatric Dermatology at Hasbro

Children’s Hospital, believes adolescents like Juliana and her classmates are particularly vulnerable. “Adolescents tend to live in the moment, and are often oblivious to or unconcerned about the long-term consequences of their actions…

Indoor tanning is very much a part of the adolescent risk-taking behavior pattern,” he says. What’s more, Bercovitch said that adolescents often have fragile self-images, striving to look, act, and dress like their peers and emulate those they idolize. If a tan is part of this ideal, then teens will go through great lengths to achieve it—oblivious to long-term risks.

As spring break approaches, students will flock to salons to build up their base.

Many salons offer special deals for high school and college students, and Spring Break Tanning in Bristol accepts the

Roger Williams University ID card as a means of payment.

It takes at least one week to see results from using a tanning bed. The majority of customers—about 70% of whom are females between the ages of 16 and 29—opt for the extra time and money to avoid the orangetint and potential streaking associated with spray-tanning.

To Neustadter, it is more troubling when people choose to tan while the information about the risks is so available: “None of that stuff was out there when I was tanning.” His diagnosis changed his life. He returned to medical school to pursue a career in dermatology, and is now a resident again at Brown Medical School, thirteen years after graduating from med school the first time. “If I knew then what I know now, I would never ever even though of tanning.”

DANA REILLY B’12 is not a rotisserie chicken.

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GOT T H E J UI CE In Defense of Soulja Boy

by Taylor Kelley Illustration by Allison Clark

2011

must have been a confusing year for Soulja Boy. Accustomed to massive commercial success and equally massive critical condemnation, last year he had zero songs crack the Billboard Hot 100 but received some of the first positive reviews of his career: his mixtapes drew blog buzz, the Fader showed him love, and his song “Zan wit that Lean” was named Pitchfork’s 25th best of the year. And yet this praise seems isolated to certain corners of the Internet; the popular narrative of Soulja Boy as one-hit wonder and talentless embodiment of hip-hop’s death persists, hardly weakened at all. Last week, for example, Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson visited Brown for a lecture entitled “Hip Hop: Should Artists be Accountable for their Words?” [A: lol]. According to the Brown Daily Herald, “Dyson called Lil Wayne a ‘rhetorical genius’ and made a distinction between the artistry of Lil Wayne’s portrayal of racism and misogyny and the music of artists such as Soulja Boy, which he said is “without artistic merit or philosophical considerations.” This type of cheap shot has become a matter of habit for Soulja haters, based off the outdated idea that he only makes music to make the kids dance (though I still don’t understand what’s wrong with that particular genre). It seems people really haven’t thought about Soulja Boy since “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” or perhaps “Turn My Swag On” amongst the radio inclined. For his sake and for mine, this should be remedied.

Soulja Boy is an important hip-hop artist for two reasons: his business influence and his artistic production. Regarding the former, let me say that Soulja is an internet God. Here’s the man himself from his recent documentary, Soulja Boy: The Movie, on childhood and computers: “We ain’t never had no computer. Went to Mississippi with my daddy; he had a computer, gave it to me.

Had the fast internet on it… got a record deal.” That’s pretty much the story. In March 2007, Soulja Boy made “Crank That” on a downloaded demo version of the beatsequencing program FruityLoops and put a video of himself dancing to it on YouTube.

Six months later it topped the Billboard Charts. By simply uploading a constant stream of free songs and videos and maintaining a very interactive online presence, he built an adolescent Internet buzz big enough to force a major-label deal (according to legend, an executive at Interscope Records signed him after asking his kids what dance they were doing). While this business model—building buzz by flooding the Internet with free content—has had some crossover success (Bieber, most notably), it’s had a profound influence on rap, and Soulja Boy invented it. Remember when Lil Wayne was putting out a song on YouTube almost

every day for months before Tha Carter III? Did you notice Azealia Banks had to crank that Soulja business model twice to make the 2012 XXL Freshman List? Do you like Lil B, Odd Future, or White Girl Mob? You can thank Soulja Boy. There’s a reason why the up-and-comers in rap the last couple years have been more creative and more experimental than ever before, and it’s that the industry doesn’t have to endorse artists for them to make a name for themselves anymore.

Even Soulja Boy’s haters sometimes acknowledge his influence on the rap industry, but very few people recognize his artistic talent. To consider Soulja musically necessarily starts with “Crank That.” In case you’ve forgotten how massive a hit it was, it not only topped the US Billboard Hot 100, but was a top five hit in at least five other countries. Soulja Boy’s personal list from his documentary of who’s done the dance reveals not only its culture ubiquity, but also his own amusing celebrity worldview: T-Pain, Chris Brown, Bow-Wow, Omarion, Jibbs, 50 Cent, Denzel Washington, Natalie Portman, Beyonce, Lil Wayne, Remy Ma, Snoop Dogg, Samuel L. Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres, Kanye West, and Regis and Kelly.

“Crank That” seems to be a mixture of two main influences: the minimalist yet danceable rhythm and goofy tone of snap music (think “Laffy Taffy” or “Lean wit It, Rock wit It”) and the abrasive delivery and jarringly unmodified 808 drum sounds of late crunk (Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck” or “Rock Yo Hips”). While this formula had worked before, perhaps most notably in Lil Jon’s “Snap Yo Fingers,” nothing from either genre had ever been so successful in the US and internationally. The dance certainly explains some of this success, but I have a hard time buying that a song could be so big on the radio for any reason other than that a lot of people wanted to listen to it.

Unless you think Soulja Boy just lucked into making some catchy tune (unlikely since he’s had other hits), then to explain its popularity one must acknowledge that Soulja Boy has some special intuition about pop music, maybe not on the level of The-Dream or Max Martin (“I Want It That Way,” “Since U Been Gone,” “Teenage Dream”), but definitely second-tier. How exactly this intuition manifests itself in songs is nearly impossible to pinpoint; a production assistant for Max Martin once described his process as more of a “gut-feeling” than holding any secrets, and Martin’s analysis of songs rarely goes past whether it “sounds good.” Soulja’s pop sensibility is no more ineffable. Take Soulja’s single “Yahhh!” Despite being a lo-fi composition of a grating, four-bar synthesizer loop, a historically bad verse by Soulja Boy’s friend Arab, and a chorus of clipped yelling, the song reached number 3 in New Zealand, a place I can only imagine has little cultural

overlap with Batesville, Mississippi. These things don’t happen by accident.

“Crank That” well represents the general process of Soulja Boy’s songwriting. He takes whatever music he likes at the time, often mixing different styles that aren’t obviously compatible, and then adds his particular pop magic. In “Turn My Swag On,” for example, released in late 2008 amidst the T-Pain-inspired trend of rappers singing Auto-Tuned “pop” songs (“Whatever You Like,” “Lollipop”), he drew on his old influences and Atlanta’s budding “futuristic” rap scene to put out a bass-heavy banger, upping the ante on other artists’ downtempo ballads. Employing only what he was best at (songcraft) and foregoing what he’s worst at (conventional rapping), Soulja managed to score a hit, despite the song’s bizarre neither-sung-nor-rapped vocals and the unusual melodic similarity between the verses and the hook. In 2010’s “Pretty Boy Swag,” Soulja used the minimalist approach of snap music with his new discovery that he need not rap (in any conventional sense) to make a rap hit, adding perhaps a touch of early Lil B to make one of the slowest club dance songs ever released. The song was a legitimate pop and rap hit by the Billboard charts, and was immensely popular in clubs despite its daring-you-to-dance tempo, almost aggressively lucid flow imitating Lil Wayne at his most drugged out, and its asthma-attack chorus that somehow still manages to be a catchy hook. Perhaps even more than “Crank That,” its success is a testament to his special pop instincts.

These days, Soulja Boy is more creative than ever, but hasn’t had a hit since the summer of 2010. His methodology is still the same—blending styles and trying to appeal to the masses—but his tastes have taken a stark turn towards the avant-garde, and he’s yet to figure out how to translate them into marketable pop. In particular, Soulja was an early advocate of weirdo Berkeley rapper Lil B, drawn to the elements of his experimental #based style farthest from the mainstream: rather than embracing the controversial catchphrases like calling himself a “bitch” or “gay” that have propelled Lil B to modest fame, Soulja is more interested in the intentionally lo-fi production and almost nihilistic refusal to engage in narrative while being provocatively repetitive. At times, Soulja Boy borrows very blatantly from Lil B, to the extent the he would be ripping him off if he’d shown any interest in trying to hide it: in “30 Thousand 100 Million,” which actually features Lil B, he begins every line in his verse with “word around town is…”, a well-know #based-ism. In other songs like “Swim,” he more fully embraces the lo-fi aesthetic, using drawn-out kicks that clip and tinny, loud snares that add an uncomfortable edge to an otherwise typical Soulja beat. His flow on most of these songs is 2/3 #based and 1/3

slowed-down Gucci Mane molasses pour.

He’s still doing him though: in “Cheat Code Swag,” Soulja brings parts of his new style to a glossy, outer-space Playstation beat and raps about his life-long affinity for video games, being so bold as to rep the manga Death Note in the music video.

While #based-inspired music is a large portion of Soulja’s current production, he likes too many different styles to really have a cohesive sound. Over the last year or so, various songs and mixtapes have shown the clear influence of Future, Waka Flocka, Rick Ross, and the remnants of the Atlanta “futuristic” movement like Skool Boy and Kwony Cash. Cash is actually signed to Soulja Boy’s record label, SODMG Entertainment and sang the hook in last summer’s internet/club hit “Zan wit that Lean,” probably Soulja’s best song, as well as the best evidence that his recent experimental binge has real promise. Musically, its as close as anyone has come to matching the pure bubblegum joy of “Ignition (Remix),” but instead of narrating having fun and being drunk, its about being carefree while fucked up on Xanax, lean (Sprite and prescriptionstrength promethazine-codeine cough syrup), and expensive weed. Cash’s line “I keep the hammer on me, I ain’t worried bout a thing,” brings to mind Soulja Boy’s emotional difficulties following a 2009 armed robbery of his house in which he ended up shooting one of the intruders. The balance of these more sinister undertones with the nonchalant materialism and sugary melody creates a complex and compelling song, one that manages to express a bliss at the brink of collapse without selling short the full intensity of the bliss at all. The surprisingly artful promo video (not the official video!) only adds to this effect with scattered images of Soulja, J-Money, and Cash dancing, playing Pacman, and blatantly drinking lean and smoking Kush.

The Internet may be slowly waking up to Soulja Boy’s artistic value, but some rappers still refuse to take notice. The washed-up elderly like Ice-T and the boring traditionalists like Fabolous hate on him.

But things are changing. More relevant artists like Snoop Dogg, Gucci Mane, and Kanye support him (Kanye has even called him one of his “favorite, most genius” artists and sought beats from him when recording My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). Soulja’s fourth album, Promise, is scheduled to drop next month, but as a major-label release it’s sure to be full of boring features and pandering tracks for the ladies. Look out for the mixtapes preceding it, though: Soulja has more gems on the way.

TAYLOR KELLEY B’12 just got out the shower. He’s wet. He’s fresh. He’s high. He’s clean. He just checked his bank account.

He’s rich. Hundred millions. He’s 19. He’s tatted.

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KILLED MY MOM IN MONTREAL

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

J

by Nick Shulman

’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) made 20-year-old writer/director/ lead actor/Montréal native Xavier Dolan an indie film circuit celebrity. The autobiographical film follows Hubert, a gay high school student upset with his single mother’s kitsch lifestyle. Misunderstood by his only close relative, Hubert acts out, sustains beatings for his sexual orientation, and navigates loving and loathing his mother.

To non-Québecois French speakers, the film’s vocabulary will seem strange. The cinematographically-inclined will note Dolan’s unique approach to dialogue: each actor is shot separately, and is placed on the far left or right of the screen. Instead of showing empty space in the direction of

their gaze, Dolan fills the frame with the space behind each actor.

When the film was originally released, it seemed that everyone in Montréal was talking about it. A teacher assigned a critique of the film for homework, while friends mentioned that they knew him before Cannes, and that he was a bit of a jerk. If the film said anything about Montréal, it was that my city’s reactions to success tend to be the same. At home, everyone has a nuanced opinion of the merit and weaker points of the kid-around-thecorner’s latest piece. Outside of Montréal, the same people could be no more proud.

Perhaps this holds for all mid-sized metropolises.

PORT(RANT)IA

by Kate Van Brocklin and Eddie Friedman

Y

Illustration by Becca Levinson

THE ONE IN BETHESDA IS BETTER

S

by Raillan Brooks

ince the summer of 2010, DC residents have suffered the indignity of DC Cupcakes, a TLC reality TV show about the employees and frequenters of Georgetown Cupcakes, a boutique cupcake shop run by sisters Sophie LaMontaigne and Katherine Kallinis. DC Cupcakes. Selfexplanatory. It’s about cupcakes in DC. So many cupcakes. And the people who eat them and love them. But I don’t eat them. I don’t love them. The show, in its unbearable strain to show the sweet side of my hometown, ends up portraying the otherwise dynamic and substantive food culture of DC as precious and ephemeral. Not to mention, your arteries aren’t the only ones they’re clogging. The line of tourists meandering out the door and practically all the way down the Potomac River fill the streets with their

blubbering. “I wonder if they’re filming today!”

My horror at the retrograde gender politics of the two sister-owners is only mollified by how cute they are as they liquify everything that’s wrong with Georgetown—conspicuous consumption, de facto segregation, the tyranny of hardbody condescension—and serve it up to us, every Monday night. But they are cute, and it looks like they’re having a good time whipping up preposterously elaborate $2.75 cupcakes, which are, in fact, kind of tasty.

Tasty enough to open a retail location in Bethesda, a reluctant suburban host, I’m sure. And so, the proprietors of Georgetown Cupcake have eaten their way into our hearts—among the other hearts they’ve eaten—for better or for worse.

TRUE PREP

B

by Jonah Wolf

y the summer of 2009, NYC Prep was as inevitable as it was impossible. Gossip Girl had proved just how compelling the Manhattan zip codes most inclined to secrecy could be. As Lisa Birnbach B’78, author of The Preppy Handbook and mother of one of my prep school classmates told the Wall Street Journal at the time, “No actual preppy kid would ever go to a casting call for something like this.” Instead, Bravo’s producers had to content themselves with second-tier preps from schools like Dwight (of the famed acronym Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together) and Birch, not to mention one Long Islander and a runt from public magnet school Stuyvesant. The elite Nightingale-Bamford’s one cast member wasn’t invited back after the show aired.

I was a senior when the show was filmed; the one junior who had initially been cast from Collegiate, my alma mater, dropped out, though you can spot a couple of my classmates in episode four’s concert scene. Since no Chapin junior would ever let a camera crew into her Park Avenue house party, the show

was mostly filmed at third-rate restaurants like that always-empty Thai place on 2nd Avenue with the space-age décor. As with any reality show, the stars forced themselves into archetypes—Jesse, the fashion plate, Camille the striver, Sebastian the lady-killer—but the fact that none of these reality stars were old enough to drink made their self-caricature all the more poignant. (This is also why it was hard to give a shit when pictures surfaced of Sebastian taping a swastika to a car window.)

Even though the show barely lasted a season, you can follow up on its cast online.

Camille, the quondam Nightingirl, had to abandon her Harvard dreams for William & Mary, though her Twitter, @cisobel, remains a testament to her wit (March 6: “Its my cabbies first day #seriousnycproblems”). But you might be better served checking out the new nycprepproblems Tumblr, whose promise of anonymity to its teenage tipsters guarantees a truer view of uptown than any TV show could.

ou’ve probably heard about the Independent Film Channel’s sketchcomedy series Portlandia, in which a “bohemian” couple, played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, obsesses over the quality of chicken they’re ordering at a restaurant to the point of insisting on visiting its farm to examine its prior living conditions.

As Portlanders, we are constantly bombarded with questions about feminist bookstores and bike regulations. Portland is a breeding ground for artisan bakers and dumpster divers alike, and—with its youthfriendly, bike-centric environment—the tagline “where young people go to retire” doesn’t seem too far off. That said, we are not all hippies who frolic in fields with Joanna Newsom. Our parents don’t need adult babysitters to keep them from playing video games, and, sadly, even our eco-obsessed city can’t figure out how to recycle bits of fingernails and eggshells into clean air, fresh water, or good vibes. There’s a contingent of Portland youth that is offended by the show, probably because it makes fun of a culture that we pretend to be unaware of. How dare these outsiders make fun of our city? Then they’ll promptly go on to criticize the newly

implemented citywide compost program.

The prevailing sentiment seems to be that only those who live in Portland can mock it. There is in fact a local movement called “Don’t Move Here” due to the large influx of people who move to our precious city.

Portlandia has glimpses of greatness, though. The scenes that hit closest to, well, home include the parody of Wieden+Kennedy, the hip Portland ad agency, where Carrie must fight through quirky office obstacles to reach the ideas meeting—hosted in a giant bird’s nest that takes flight. The scene is not too extreme to believe, for this sort of unorthodox brainstorming session is illustrative of the city’s strangeness. The unofficial slogan isn’t Keep Portland Weird for nothing.

So yes, we are proud of our community gardens and world’s largest naked bike ride. We went to high schools that had classes on sweat lodges and lucid dreaming.

The opening sequence may evoke a dream city—golden-hued, tree-lined avenues, veggies growing everywhere and bookstore emporiums—but perhaps the most infuriatingly deceptive aspect of the show is this: it never rains in Portlandia.

IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY

O

by Sarah Denaci

n August 4, 2005, for the first time, people like me, people like the people I knew appeared on television.

Everyone dressed like it was three and a half years ago and some of them cared about hockey. Families were antisocial units who actively worked to hinder their members’ success and happiness. Beer was only the cheap kind. People ate at Wawa and laughed at jokes about non-consensual sex.Their only aspirations were schemes and schemes were their only hobbies. I personally read the cannibalism episode as an allegory about the greatness of cheesesteaks.

Most of all, and best of all, finally there was a woman on television I could relate to. She was quickwitted and bony. Fixated on her appearance, but only interested in deliberately second-rate guys who functioned as a sort of joke that no one else understood. Taunted and excluded by her male friends, but still sure that they would

include her the next time. A proponent of sexism and elitism although herself a lower-middle-class woman. A graduate of an Ivy League school but of questionable intelligence. Attached to her artistic aspirations, but clearly, almost proudly, talentless. Contrary to Freud’s offensive and sexist allegation that women only have “erotic ambitions,” Sweet Dee Reynolds had no ambitions. She was not really a salad eater and sort of a whore.

The show’s only factual error was that it took like five seasons for Mac to become fat.

A real Philly man already would have been.

It was years before I understood that the rest of the country did not see It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as celebratory or aspirational.

HERE WE COME

I

by Will Peterson

’m from California—the Southern part—Orange County…” And BOOM, even though I’ve just introduced myself, I have no chance at a clean slate: I'm just a not-Seth-not-Marissa-not-Ryan. And given my pale skin, which emits a soft not-OC sheen, I’m quick to disassociate myself from anything that reeks of beach. Predicting the

blitz of “do you surf do you bikini do you listen to Spoon?”, my next line is probably something like, “I swear it’s not like that…”

But really, it’s just deceit, because the sad truth is that life in the OC often is like the show—maybe intentionally so.

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ABRAMS’ TABBOULEH – serves 4 CA: “I’ve seen many recipes of tabbouleh, in articles and magazines, but it doesn’t look anything like the real thing—they put more wheat than anything.”

EAST OF EASTSIDE Home is Where the Tripe is Boiling

by Maya Sikand Illustration by Alexander Dale

I

f you ask the right person in Providence today, they will tell you: in the fifties there were grape vines in every yard in Fox Point. In those days—Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, Italians, Armenians, Greeks, Irish—families from all over lived in the neighborhood. Items like olive oil were easy to find and everybody used their grape vines for different specialties, be it wine, Lebanese anisette or rolled and stuffed grape leaves.

Catherine and George Abrams lived at 105 Sheldon Street for 58 years. Catherine was born at 99 Sheldon Street in 1933 and when she got married she moved next door.

The Abrams do not speak Arabic, nor have they ever been abroad. Yet the food they ate was embedded in a culture thousands of miles away—the Mediterranean cuisine of their parents’ homeland, Lebanon.

Today Catherine and George live in Barrington with their daughter, Karen. The couple, now in their eighties, had to leave Fox Point two years ago; it was getting hard for them to live by themselves. Now Karen and her brother are around to care for them, but after three-quarters of a century in Fox Point, there are many things they miss. Still, some things come to them: every month, the priest from their Lebanese Maronite church visits their home to administer communion.

And thanks to their daughter Karen, they still enjoy fresh, homemade Lebanese food.

Growing up, Catherine and her family often ate vegetables stuffed with rice, some meat, garlic, onions and spices. As Catherine explains, “We stuffed squash, stuffed cabbage, what else, stuffed peppers, we stuffed everything!” Another staple was kibbeh, a Mediterranean cousin of steak tartare and the national dish of Lebanon, which must be eaten the day that it’s made. Leftovers of the raw ground meat can be fried into meatballs called kofte. Every now and then, there were occasions special enough to warrant stuffed tripe: a mixture of ground lamb, rice, and chickpeas, sewn into the fatless lining of a cow’s stomach and boiled for hours.

Sometimes, Catherine’s father would make sausages. She describes the process: “My father would get the casing of the lamb, just like the kind for hotdogs. He’d wash it, that was a big process, just at home in the kitchen, and then he would put it in his hand, and have a loop, and he’d stuff it and he’d stuff it and you’d get yards of sausage—sometimes miles, running around like that and he’d boil it. It was delicious. He’d stuff it with lamb, rice, spices that we use—the cumin, the cinnamon—

onions cut very small, and olive oil.”

The hardest part was getting fresh lamb.

For that, there was a meat market downtown, or the Armenian butcher on Federal Hill.

Often the family made a whole Saturday trip out of going to Federal Hill, taking the trolley car or walking. There, they could find men with vegetables on pushcarts, mostly from local farms. The finds were worth the trek: “You always want it fresh, you don’t want dried or canned anything, it tastes completely different,” Catherine explains. “I mean, packaging, cans, I didn’t even know what that was! I grew up knowing that tomato paste came in a can, and that’s it.” Back in Fox Point, there was Friends Market, still owned today by Mr. Pedroso, at 126 Brook Street.

And the A&P Store on Wickenden, which was owned by George’s uncle. George grew up above it and later worked there for many years. The old A&P Store is now a nail salon.

A lot of ingredients were easier to find fresh and more affordable back in the fifties. Now, the Abrams have to get their lamb from Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. There was a point when they couldn’t get tripe anywhere, but then they found it at the Compare Supermarket on Broad Street.

Even there, Karen struggles to find what she’s looking for: she doesn’t need it cut up for stew like the Mexicans, nor does she eat that rubbery dark tripe they sometimes have.

Catherine and George’s story is one piece in the mosaic of cultures that make up Fox Point. Today Brown students live alongside the last Portuguese, Cape Verdean and Lebanese neighbors still around. There are only a few blocks between sushi on Wickenden and Portuguese sweet bread on Ives. Among these changing communities, grape vines continue to grow in the Point, and in the Abrams’ Barrington backyard too. Even though their kitchen has moved a few miles away, the national dishes from their distant homeland continue to simmer and stew: “What we grew up on is what we love. And if you can’t eat what you love, then you’re taking away a big part of what you’re trying to pass on.”

MAYA SIKAND B’13.5 stuffs everything.

What you’ll need: 6 bunches of flat parsley, without stems 3 tomatoes, finely chopped 1 long English cucumber 1-4 bunches scallions 1 large bag of radishes, diced with ends cut off 1 bunch fresh mint Juice of 1-2 lemons Cinnamon, salt, pepper, ground cumin 4 cups bulgar 1. Rinse bulgar until water runs clear. Soak in cold water for 15-20 minutes, until it is soft.

2. Mix with chopped vegetables, lemon juice, and spices.

ABRAMS’ RAW KIBBEH 1.Grind: Large white onion, chopped Palm-full of fresh mint 2 tbsp cinnamon and cumin Salt, pepper 2. In a large bowl, mix: 1 ½ cups soaked bulgar (see tabbouleh recipe), 3 lb. ground beef Onion, spice Make sure to keep this cold—either by adding in ice cubes directly or placing a large bowl of ice underneath—so that bacteria does not form.

3. Put on a platter 4. Eat with Lebanese bread, pour some olive oil over a portion in your dish, with chopped spring onions.

ABRAMS’ STUFFED TRIPE (GHAAME) – serves 4 Catherine Abrams: “I’ve had many people sit at my table and say they wouldn’t eat lamb if you paid them, and they ate and—oh so delicious. I say, well you ate lamb.”

What you’ll need: 6 pieces tripe (available at Compare Supermarket on Broadway) 1.5lb. ground lamb 3 cups parboiled white rice 2 cans chickpeas 1/2 white onion Syrian or Lebanese all-spice Salt, pepper, extra-virgin olive oil Cooking twine Needles – with large eye Large pot (for boiling) 1. Purchase white tripe. Lamb will work, but around here you’ll probably find beef. Make sure it’s white and all in one piece.

2. Sew 3 edges of the tripe to form a pocket.

Just like you would cloth into a pillow case.

3. In a large bowl add parboiled white rice. Mix with 1.5lbs of ground lamb. Add 1-2 cans of drained chickpeas. Add ¾ of a cup of olive oil, 1 tbsp spice, salt and pepper to taste.

4. Stuff mixture into tripe pockets until half full.

Add one or two onion quarters, depending on size of tripe. Then add a bit more rice. (Don’t fill to the top, as rice will expand).

5. Finish sewing to close pocket.

6. Place in a pot of water so that the trip is just covered. Bring to boil and cook at mediumhigh for at least two hours. Test: ready if a fork goes in easily. Serve with tabbouleh.

sports 17

the college hill independent

BALL SO HARD

Jeremy Lin Shows Race Matters More Than Ever

by Alex Seoh Illustration by Diane Zhou

A

fter declaring for the 2010 NBA Draft out of Harvard, Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin got passed over for 60 other players. He had no guaranteed path to a team roster. When he eventually signed with the Golden State Warriors after proving himself in summer workouts, he’d already begun generating buzz. He was a double underdog: not only had the last Ivy League NBA player retired in 2003, but he was also an Asian American aspiring to be a professional basketball player, a novelty in itself.

When finally given significant playing time, Lin made the most out of it and single handedly took the Knicks on a seven-game winning streak, putting up unprecedented numbers for a first-time NBA starter. The media dubbed it things like “Linsanity,” “A Linspiring Story,” and “Linpossible is nothing.”

Lin’s sudden emergence has sparked many questions. Every team in the league was forced to examine how they had missed a chance to sign the NBA’s newest star. Their motivation to pass on Lin becomes clearer when the process of drafting and its complications are examined.

Drafting is all about managing risk and predicting how certain players will develop.

There’s almost no such thing as a sure bet.

Michael Jordan is generally considered the best basketball player in history, but he was only the third pick in the 1984 draft. It’s extremely difficult to predict how someone will adapt to the league. Take a look at the 60 players taken over Lin in the 2010 draft.

Only ten of them start for their teams; ten others are no longer in the league.

Drafting well can make or break a team in the NBA, and, to simplify the complexities, profiling by recruiters has become rampant. When analysts were describing the future of white BYU star Jimmer Fredette in the NBA, for example, they likened him to white Orlando Magic shooting guard J.J. Reddik, due to the limited roles they both played for their teams as shooting specialists. The comparison to Reddik is easy to understand, but why not James Jones, a black sharpshooter for the Miami Heat, to whom Fredette was arguably more similar? There were plenty of other players to compare him to, but they picked the prototypically white shooting guard. The same problem applies to Spanish import Ricky Rubio. Even though he plays point guard, he was compared to

the Gasol brothers, who both play power forward, due solely to the fact that they all play a “Spanish” brand of basketball: one with solid fundamentals, good footwork, and over-enthusiastic passing.

But Lin doesn’t have a brand. There isn’t an Asian template of basketball yet. He’s the only player in the NBA not yet bound by stereotypes that pervade the game. While he’s not bound by a prototype, that ultimately is what made his early career so difficult.

Although the game is ultimately a game of results—where only the best players with the best skills make the cut—sometimes it takes more than that. Sometimes it takes the talent, the work to develop that talent, and then an extra heap of willpower to convince someone to look beyond skin color.

Maybe everyone was just scared of Lin because they didn’t know who he’d be; he was un-sortable. Because there have been none, it was only assumed that Asian Americans weren’t athletic enough to compete in basketball at the highest level. Almost every college coach skipped over him, as did all the NBA general managers. But that’s not the problem.

Lin’s emergence has also spurred a heightened awareness of the issue of race in both the media and the sports world. A Cambridge Ben and Jerry’s recently came under heavy criticism for its “Taste the Linsanity” flavor, because it included fortune cookies.

Some of Lin’s teammates have even been criticized for bowing to him in a ceremonial fashion. ESPN fired the editor responsible for the headline “A chink in the armor,” after the Knicks were had their seven-game winning streak snapped by the Hornets.

Lin is in uncharted territory and is fighting preconceived notions about his game. “After a game, a lot of players say: he’s quicker than he looks.” said Lin in an interview.

What exactly does “quicker than he looks” mean? Basketball commentators like Jeff Van Gundy, who have barely even seen Lin play, usually describe him to have a “high Basketball IQ” leaning on already established Asian American stereotypes. Jeremy has repeatedly said that he wants to be seen as an athlete, not an Asian American athlete.

And he makes his point on the court. With each layup, each assist, each jumpshot, he challenges his doubters and puts points on the scoreboard.

That’s not to say Lin’s story can be divorced from his race. Basketball isn’t just a game of numbers. As of 2010, 82 percent of the league was African American, and the sport is deeply intertwined with hip-hop and other elements of black culture. It’s unsurprising to hear “Who’s marking the white guy?” in a pickup game. “Orchestra is on the other side of campus,” he’d hear as a member of the Crimson in opposing Ivy League gyms.

On the other side, most of Lin’s supporters also allude to race. Aside from the puns off of his last name, common signs at Madison Square Garden include “EMPEROR LIN” and “BRING GOOD FORTUNE ON THE KNICKS.” Even with good intentions, racial epithets are a problematic backdrop to Lin’s rise. Adding race in the context of any competition does nothing but taint the art of the sport. Until we as society can move past the racial associations and stereotypes that leech onto basketball, Lin’s points, his wins, his assists, will all be just “Asian.” The larger question is how to arrive at a point where players are judged simply by how hard they ball.

ALEX SEOH B’14 goes hard in the paint.

18 literary

9 march 2012