The College Hill Independent — Vol 48 Issue 3

Cecilia

Jenny Hu

Sofia Barnett, Keelin Gaughan &

Fiona Frohnapfel

Valerie Skinner

Andrew Lu

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Emilie

Masthead

MANAGING EDITORS

Angela Lian

Arman Deendar

Kolya Shields

WEEK IN REVIEW

Cecilia Barron

Yoni Weil

ARTS

Dri de Faria

George Nickoll

Linnea Hult

EPHEMERA

Colin Orihuela

Quinn Erickson

FEATURES

Luca Suarez

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Plum Luard

LITERARY

Jane Wang

Madeline Canfield

METRO

Ashton Higgins

Keelin Gaughan

Sofia Barnett

SCIENCE + TECH

Christina Peng

Daniel Zheng

Jolie Barnard

WORLD

Ana Furtado

James Langan

Tanvi Anand

X

Claire Chasse

Joshua Koolik

Lola Simon

DEAR INDY

Solveig Asplund

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Sam Stewart

BULLETIN BOARD

Emilie Guan

RL Wheeler

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Yunan (Olivia) He

*Our Beloved Staff

DESIGN EDITORS

Andrew Liu

Ollantay Avila

Ash Ma

COVER COORDINATORS

Julia Cheng

Sylvie Bartusek

STAFF WRITERS

Abani Neferkara

Aboud Ashhab

Angela Qian

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Charlie Medeiros

Charlinda Banks

Corinne Leong

Coby Mulliken

David Felipe

Emily Mansfield

Emily Vesper

Gabrielle Yuan

Jenny Hu

Kalie Minor

Kayla Morrison

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Maya Avelino

Martina Herman

Nadia Mazonson

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Naomi Nesmith

Nora Mathews

Riley Gramley

Riyana Srihari

Saraphina Forman

Yunan (Olivia) He

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Anji Friedbauer

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Ayla Tosun

Becca Martin-Welp

Ilan Brusso

Lila Rosen

Naile Ozpolat

Samantha Ho

Yuna Shprecher

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Eurie Seo

Jolie Barnard

Nat Mitchell

Yuna Shprecher

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

MISSION STATEMENT

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Izzy Roth-Dishy

Julia Cheng

DESIGNERS

Anahis Luna

Eiffel Sunga

Jolin Chen

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Nada (Neat) Rodanant

Nor Wu

Rachel Shin

Riley Cruzcosa

Ritvik Bhadury

Sejal Gupta

Simon Yang

Tanya Qu

Yuexiao Yang

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Lucy Pham

ILLUSTRATORS

Abby Berwick

Aidan Choi

Alena Zhang

Angela Xu

Anna Fischler

Avery Li

Catie Witherwax

Cindy Liu

Ellie Lin

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee

Luca Suarez

Luna Tobar

Meri Sanders

Mingjia Li

Muzi Xu

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Jessica Ruan

Julianne Ho

Ren Long

Ru Kachko

Sofia Schreiber

Sylvie Bartusek

COPY CHIEF

Ben Flaumenhaft

WEB DESIGNERS

Eleanor Park

Lucy Pham

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Na Nguyen

SENIOR EDITORS

Angela Qian

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

Isaac McKenna

Jane Wang

Lily Seltz

Lucia Kan-Sperling

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Week in

Being Well

c YVONNE WINONE, coroner for the stars and Indy columnist

Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Neuralink’s project’s success’s news sent shockwaves that spread like wildfire across the web this past week, demolishing inboxes and group chats, eventually landing as a throbbing ember in my lap, burning my crotch. As I jumped up and yelped in shock, I considered what this monumental step in cyborg technology could mean for the wellness community.

Wellness, in the minds of many cynical students among my readership, is nothing more than making some time for one’s own physical and mental well-being in the course of an otherwise workadelic and debauched lifestyle. And while the general public imagines going for a walk, eating some of grandma’s goulash, and doing derma-care, there is a more radical wing of the wellness community out there, and I am proud to count myself as a member. People round my way don’t see wellness as a mere accessory to life, but rather as the proper objective in service of which we should orient our lives.

Among Wellers (the term for people who have dedicated their lives to wellness), there are a few factions. There are the Anarcho-Wellers, who believe in decentralized, grassroots radical wellness (and among Anarcho-Wellers there are countless sub-groups that claim to be fundamentally incompatible, but I won’t get into that here). There is a Weller contingent under the umbrella of Effective Altruism whose goal is to maximize total wellness in the world by means of hyper-rational, privatized, future-oriented wellness projects (some suspect that Musk himself is a crypto-Effective Altruism Weller of this ilk). There are also Eco-Wellers, Satanic Wellers, Masonic Wellers, Gnostic Wellers, and Ascetic Wellers. I, however, am a proud Techno-Weller, which is why the news of Neuralink’s successful operation on a human set the gears in my head-a-turnin’ so fast.

Cyborg technology, in my estimation, represents the next great step in our inevitable (albeit bumpy) journey to total wellness among all people. For many years, wellness technology has been bumping up against the edges of our bodies—just ask my mom, whose Theragun I stole!—and wellness

technology for the mind is everywhere these days (shoutout to my AI shrink, Patricizorp). With this leap in cyborg tech, our brains and nervous systems might be next, and boy do the pastures look green. Imagine if we could control the devices around us with just a thought! What if you could draw a bath and add scented salts with a flip of the cerebellum? And don’t think that this is limited to just Bluetooth smart appliances. With cyborg wellness, we could be talking about Inspector Gadget-level articulated personal grooming devices, all operated by the mind. As soon as the thought occurs to you, a device attached to your body will already be gently exfoliating your face. As soon as you feel a little bit overwhelmed, a cyborg arm could be forcibly clearing out some personal space within a radius of your choosing. These are just a few possibilities, and the true wellness implications of cyborg technology are likely far beyond what I can imagine here and now; in short, perhaps we are on the precipice of something truly spectacular, and profoundly well

c CRIANNA BLUDGEON, Rhode Island

Budget Skimmer and Indy columnist

I swore off technology in 2008, once it was clear that the click-clack of the Blackberry wouldn’t win against the swwipppp-plop of the iPhone. I only used my Blackberry as an auditory relaxant before bed, and I knew, like any educated person, that technology is evil and should be fought against, so giving up the bling-blang of Big Tech was easy for me. That’s why I was especially shocked when my dear friend Yvonne Winone delivered the news to me via courier: Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip patient had already moved a computer mouse with their mind. News comes to me when it wills itself, so the last I had heard of Musk, he was smoking doobies with a podcast elf. Yet Yvonne tells me he’s now the emboldened yet secret leader of Effective Altruism Wellers. Time moves quickly when you’ve sworn off clocks and wheels.

As I write this on a stone tablet, I can’t help but smile thinking of you readers, scrolling through your flat screens and flipping through your flat

( TEXT CECILIA BARRON YONI WEIL DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG )

paper, reading these words without any obstacle or abrasive texture. I am literally dragging my stylus through clay, drying out my skin, crying tears of blood onto this stone in order to deliver these words to you. The helpful Indy ancient Greek translator Stephanopolous McDonald will spend hours deciphering “podcast elf” so that you can glance through every other sentence of this column. And Elon Musk will laugh his little Afrikaaner laugh and move his little mouse with his little brain, and he will feel no abrasive texture at all.

Life is a struggle, Wellers, and although my great friend Yvonne often runs errands for me since I haven’t yet figured out self-checkout, I will have to indulge some information that might cloud his approval of such technologies. A couple of weeks ago, I had wandered over to Mr. Winone’s house to celebrate Boedromia, to thank Apollo for his assistance during the Athenian wars. I walked into quite a sight. Yvonne was catatonic, staring at the TV which was playing Blackberry typing ASMR. The room was entirely white and everything was labeled. A cyborg massaged him with a Theragun. A third mechanic hand had stretched out from his neck in order to exfoliate his lower back. Spa music played from his ears, radiating out into the living room. He was becoming so smooth, I feared he might liquidate right there on the white sectional!

Although we were able to make our sacrifices for Boedromia, I left the evening deeply worried for my friend and fellow columnist. Would he never know the pain of loading an asinus with your packs and traveling through the woods of India Point Park? Would he ever know the difficulty of falling asleep to silence? Would he ever understand the horrific beauty of infoliated skin? Yvonne Winone and Elon Musk’s patient no. 1 might be able to traverse the space of the contemporary with glazed eyes, reflective skin, and a multi-dimensional brain. But that is not the future. The future will be delivered to us in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Until then, there’s no use in praying to the god of Tékhne

CB B’24 and YW B’24 are on the precipice of something truly spectacular.

( TEXT JENNY HU DESIGN MIMI YANG ILLUSTRATION SITONG LIU )

c It’s my first night in New York City since that seventh grade science fair I lost to an unsuccessful cloning attempt, and Andre insists we go clubbing, taking an Uber for almost an hour to get to some seedy little place he likes in Brooklyn.

I usually find my actresses here, he explains, propping the door open for me with his foot. Well, here and on campus.

Andre is tall and dark-haired and stick-skinny, transplanted to the States when he was fifteen after his parents exiled him from Macau. He shares a birthday with my mother, as well as the same violent Capricorn ambition, the kind that drives both of them manic around year’s end. We met in high school, where he whisked his way through classes, made huge abstract paintings in the crumbling studio, and gave me a tattoo after sophomore homecoming with a needle, Sharpie ink, and Vaseline. Now he directs porn shoots with women in mermaid costumes and men in tiger masks and the occasional orgy, taking business classes at Columbia to keep his student visa.

Inside the club, colorful lights flash dimly in strobes, red, blue, girls in corset tops and leather pants standing in loose clusters, hair ragged, wild, and huge. A pair of ginger twins shakes their asses against each other and sticks out their tongues. I smooth down my skirt as I follow Andre through the thrumming crowds, bodies moving out of my way like glittering shadows, shiny silver wrappers with nothing inside.

Andre looks over my shoulder at the thrashing figures. Remember senior year, he says, when we’d go to that horrible karaoke bar in Losantiville and make out with those old white dudes.

Of course, I say. We thought we were so grown up, armed with those awful fake IDs, putting red lipstick on each other, getting high in the dark and telling each other stories about the guys we’d fucked. The marks on our bodies gave us a story, a real narrative, something to say. We wore a flimsy, curated smugness so thin it started to tear. But of course every day we put on hoop earrings and leather and

shoes we could hardly walk in, let alone run. On my eighteenth birthday, I had to pull my stilettos off my feet when a stranger on the street started sprinting after us, shouting what he wanted each of us to do to him; it was months before I wore heels again.

God, Lucy, we were so stupid, he says, and laughs.

Sparkling and hot from vodka, I think I could climb out of myself and float up, up, up, where the dark inside of me would fade right into the ceiling and I could stare at the whole world down below, my little boots and little dress and hair too long for the city. I think I could forget about the semester tuition I can’t afford, the therapy bills, the ragged brown notebook full of my unprintable stories—pages and pages of insecure young women and the ugly old men they fuck—and the afternoons I spend in that hideous green apron, pouring coffees behind the counter for students taking classes that actually mean something, doctors, lawyers, and engineers, the type of thing my mother thought I was going to be. For once she’d been so happy when I got accepted

to my university for neuroscience, clutching my hands and kissing my face, buying me earrings and stuffed animals I didn’t know what to do with, cooking full dinners and baking cheesecakes and sitting at the table so we could eat them together.

Aren’t you glad you’re here, Andre shouts in my ear as we dance. Music pulsing through us in coarse beats, bitter taste persistent in my mouth.

This is familiar—the two of us, him and me. Pushing ourselves and each other all the way toward oblivion, just for the chance to glimpse something with meaning or beauty. Even though it’s been almost a year since the last time he visited me, we’ve slipped back into our usual dance without speaking, soundlessly and seamlessly.

Thank you for having me, I scream back.

But already he has his arms around some Slavic guy, face pressed against his neck, hair dripping heavy with sweat, spilling into his eyes, and if he hears me, he gives no sign of it.

We don’t speak in the Uber on the way home, darkness settling silken outside the windows, lush and heavy. There is some song from ten years ago playing, the kind of thing I loved in elementary school, metallic and shiny and too peppy for this time of night. Andre’s eyes are closed, brows furrowed, and I watch the city blur past, my face pressed on the grimy glass.

In high school, I used to be so afraid for him. I was afraid all the time because he made me think of that bag of winds from the Odyssey, the one we spent a whole class on in freshman English, violent and held together by nothing but a fragile drawstring. He would joke about killing himself in the most graphic and terrible of ways: sawing off his limbs and mailing them to me like Van Gogh’s ear, unraveling his intestines out his asshole, wrenching his heart out through his throat. Sometimes I’d one-up him, but most of the time I just listened, and I knew we would be best friends because I’d never met anyone else who hated themself as much as I did.

Now back in his apartment, his arm is braced around my shoulder as we stumble through the kitchen, shoelaces trailing, straps slipping. I wish I were still properly drunk. The walls are covered with paintings and photographs and various accolades. A framed black-and-white picture of him and his little brother in Dubai, next to a plaque for some flick he shot last summer about three firefighters at a country club.

You should be in one of my videos, he says, out of the blue. I think you’d be good at it.

I twist away from him. Are you calling me a slut?

Yes, he says. Am I wrong?

A wave of nausea passes through me, thick and sour. I’m not a porn star, I say.

Not yet, he says. He tugs on my hair. But you could be.

I wrap my arms around myself and stare out his bedroom window at the glittering night outside. His New York apartment is Scandinavian sleek and meticulously clean, paid for in its entirety with the returns from his mother’s investments, contingent on the fact that he calls her three times a week with life updates that grow more and more far-fetched with each passing year: a perfect GPA, a part-time equity research job on Wall Street, a nice white girlfriend he met volunteering at a soup kitchen.

Just think about it, he says to me. People on the Internet love Asian girls, you know. Can’t get enough of them.

I don’t know when it was that he began speaking to me like this; if he started gradually or if he just always has. I twist my head over my shoulder to avoid his direct stare, but I feel his gaze on me just the same, searing right into my bones.

You’re fucking creepy, I say.

He smirks at me and shrugs. No, he says, stretching his legs out on the wood-paneled floor, which gleams and shines, unmarred, beneath his black pants. No, Lucy, I’m an artist.

from his face as he parses through the pages. He’s in a pair of pajama pants he stole from a slumber-party shoot, red and white and black tartan with OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY written up the left leg.

What the fuck, I say, pulling my robe tighter around myself. Who said you could read that?

He doesn’t even glance up. Who said you could write about me?

I sit on the edge of the bed. It creaks beneath me, swaying under my weight. Well, what do you think, I say, slowly.

It doesn’t matter what I think, he says, and turns a page. Are any of these published?

Sourness sits heavy beneath my tongue. Dense and low and dirty like a rock. No, I say. Does that matter?

A pause. Most writers have second jobs, you know, he says, softer. And porn pays better than making lattes.

I can’t look at him because I know the expression he has on his face. I don’t think I can face the disappointment with which he’s certainly watching me, just like the look on my mother’s face when I lost my scholarship, or when I told her I knew the things my father did behind her back, or when I was thirteen and she found the texts from that boy on my phone, the things he said and the things I said and, worst of all, the photos I sent him. Like Andre, she hadn’t yelled or screamed; she just stood there in my bedroom and watched me with those cruel, quiet eyes that could suddenly see all the way inside of me—through the sequins and brashness and skin to the murky, repulsive places I’ve never dared to think too hard about, except perhaps on the page.

Andre draws his knees up to his chest and watches me. What’s wrong, he asks.

All of a sudden I feel like I’m going to cry. I think I miss my mother, I say.

Oh, Lucy, Andre says, flipping through the ink-stained pages in my little brown notebook. I can tell.

+++

Around two in the morning, Andre announces he’s hungry, so we migrate to the kitchen, where he pulls a box of mozzarella sticks out of the freezer and begins dumping them onto a curved porcelain plate. Icy shards tumble jagged and small onto the counter. I stretch out a hand and scoop them up on my finger, letting them melt against my skin.

Taking great care of yourself as always, I say.

No diet better than depression, he says, and grins. Under the golden glow of his overhead lighting fixture, his bones jut and taunt.

He has the kind of skeletal face that often gets him scouted on the street. It’s also the kind of face that made me resent him sometimes, when we went to bars and the beautiful men would flock to him in magnetic silence, leaving me abandoned with a half-empty drink; we’d place bets on whether they preferred boys or girls, and almost every time he would win, sitting smugly in the backseat of our Uber, dizzy-drunk on tequila and kisses and victory.

Are you still seeing that venture capital guy, Andre asks me, glancing over his shoulder.

I got sick of him, I say. And then I feel a terrible hollowness as I think of that final night in his loft, sprawled out on his king bed in the quiet light from the TV. I had my face buried in his Alexander Wang t-shirt because he smelled so good, citrusy, like the shampoo my mother used to use. His fingers were trailing zigzags through my hair. Almost three months, a whirlwind of dinner dates and blow jobs, the longest relationship I’d ever kept. When he said he’d met someone more appropriate—a woman his own age—I didn’t even hear him at first because I’d been so mesmerized by his scent.

Andre gives me a long, knowing look. The age gap was kind of weird anyway, he says, before turning around again.

Speaking of relationships, where’s Andy, I say, crossing my legs as I brace my hands on the countertop. When do I get my introduction?

“And still I’d go inside over and over and over, year after year, because something about that disorientation felt so right and so easy and so free. I recognized it each time; it felt safe, like going home.”

it’s not like we were anything in the first place.

What, I say. But—

Besides, he says. You know I hate when gay couples have the same name.

The microwave beeps. He sets the plate down and shoves it at me, slumping against the granite.

I thought you said it was going well, I say, quietly.

Eat a fucking mozzarella stick, he says.

Why can’t you just let someone be close to you, I say.

Oh my God, don’t you get it, he snaps, and slams his hands onto the counter.

I stare at him. Andre—

Don’t you get it? He wanted to live with me. He wanted to meet my parents. Wouldn’t stop asking about it. Can you imagine how that would’ve gone? The look on my mum’s face?

He stabs a mozzarella stick with a fork, bright white cheese oozing out of the lumpy shell. I watch as it spreads across the plate, liquid and hot, like spilled paint.

At least you and I can be miserable together, he says at last, softer.

I rest my chin in my hands and look at him. In his tartan pajama pants, he seems so young. Fifteen all over again—the first day of high school, sitting under the window in English class, the Odyssey in his right hand, haughty and imperious and all alone.

At least there’s that, I say.

+++

We climb into bed when light starts peeking through the edge of his window, staining the bottom of the sky in a pale, sickly white. He draws his curtains tight and folds himself under the duvet next to me. In the background, the Kardashians bicker, the only show we can agree on.

We should go to Arizona once we’re done with finals, I say. Didn’t you always want to see the Grand Canyon? Or Yellowstone?

He rolls onto his back and gazes up at the ceiling. I might be back in Macau by then, he says.

What, I say, sharply. I thought you weren’t going back.

My mum found me an internship, he says. Working for her friend in finance.

I pinch my lips tight. What about your porn gig?

It’s stupid anyway, he says. I don’t really care.

What? I stare at him. Why do you always do what she tells you to do?

Because. If I don’t, she’ll start asking questions. She hasn’t found anything out yet, I say. She will if she wants to. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Then he is quiet for a long time. Silence thrumming awful and electric and soft between us. And there’s just no reason for her to know, he says at last. No point in upsetting her.

I bury the side of my face in my pillow. If I squeeze my eyes shut hard enough, it almost looks like the darkness is glimmering. Swaying and shifting and holographic, like that room at our high school’s carnival, the one with the floor that tipped and shone and made me so dizzy I thought I was going to throw up. And still I’d go inside over and over and over, year after year, because something about that disorientation felt so right and so easy and so free. I recognized it each time; it felt safe, like going home.

When I emerge from the shower into Andre’s room, he is sitting on his palatial king bed with my little brown notebook in his lap, wet hair slicked back

He busies himself with the microwave, jamming his thumb against one button after another. A light flickers on; the little glass base inside begins to spin and whir.

Andre, I say.

We broke up too, he says, and shrugs. Well,

It’s not fair, I say.

No, he says, and lets out a breath.

In between us, the whole world sinks and sits like a sigh.

JENNY HU B’26 just turned twenty.

Democracy in Danger

Providence City Councilman Miguel Sanchez talks censorship,

policing of pro-Palestine speech

c Miguel Sanchez, Ward 6 Councilman for the city of Providence, was unilaterally fired from his position as constituent service associate to Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee on October 27 of last year, following a series of pro-Palestine and pro-ceasefire social media posts. Last Wednesday, Feb. 23, the College Hill Independent spoke with Sanchez about local politics, the policing of free speech, advocacy, and current threats to democracy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Indy: I remember reading about you being unilaterally fired by Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee at the end of last year over a pro-Palestine tweet and thinking, ‘What did he say that was so egregious?’ How did the actual firing happen and why do you think it occurred?

Sanchez: I mean, the whole ordeal happened super quickly. I’ve always been pretty vocal on Palestinian rights. On October 7, I saw that mainstream politicians and news media were very quickly siding unconditionally with the Israeli government. But I saw a statement from a congressional candidate in Texas, Pervez S. Agwan, and it acknowledged the history with the Palestinian people and the different atrocities that have consistently been occurring.

So I quote-tweeted that, saying ‘It’s important to condemn violence against civilians, but also understand that this isn’t a random situation.’ It’s not a random event, you can[n’t] look solely at October 7 to truly understand what the Palestinian people have been going through for decades. That was it that day—I put something out.

On October 21, there was a Providence rally organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation; it was the first action here in Providence. So of course, I attended it. It was pouring [rain] and there were still around 1,000 people. I felt proud to be a Providence resident that day. We were with so many folks that shared the same thoughts and opinions and emotions. I tweeted the next day, and it picked up a bit on social media. At that point, no news media had reached out to me nor anyone in the governor’s office. The rally was on Saturday, I posted on Sunday, and then the following Monday was the first time anyone internally in the governor’s office said anything to me about it. It wasn’t even my direct manager. It was one of the senior staffers. It was a very sincere conversation; he pretty much said that they were starting to receive some inquiries about [my] social media post, and we agreed that I would ‘tone it down.’ Obviously, I don’t agree with it, personally, but I understand the gray line. I have to try to balance working for an elected official while also being an elected official myself. That following Tuesday, I was informed that a local journalist had reached out to the governor’s office [about] where the governor stands on the Israel-Palestine conflict because his and one of his staff members’ opinions are completely different. And that’s when I talked to the communications director. And in his own words, he said, ‘This is a PR concern for the governor.’ In my perspective, the governor could have easily responded with his communication team that ‘What [Miguel] does on his own time is his choice and [he] is welcome to have different opinions in our office,” but instead he decided to double down.

Indy: The Governor’s response prompts the question of where they draw the line between you as an individual and you as an affiliate of your workplace. Were you informed about how potentially having a dissenting opinion—or publicly deviating from what’s normally expected of staffers within the administration—might impact you?

Sanchez: Yes. But their biggest thing internally was to just keep an open line of communication. ‘If you can give us a heads up if you’re gonna go do a press conference or put out a bill that goes completely in contradiction with the governor’s opinion on something specific, let us know,’ basically. Senior staff members have always been pretty open about that. But what was different about this situation is that I did not even put out a formal press release. I did not host a press conference. I was not out there saying, ‘Oh, my boss should have this opinion or the governor should be saying this.’ I was saying what I, Miguel Sanchez, Providence City Councilor, thought. I was not saying, ‘I, Miguel Sanchez, Providence City Councilor, really urge my employer to have this opinion.’ Obviously, it was discouraging to see his opinions and that of most mainstream media and politicians. But at that point, I was not even telling them what to do. I was just trying to balance, or at least offer, another voice that a lot of constituents of Rhode Island and Providence have.

Indy: I think it’s strange for any elected official to project a monolithic view on something when you understand that, just by nature of having constituents in a democracy with different viewpoints, there will be more than one viewpoint articulated. What do you think about the other politicians, like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, being censured by the House for pro-Palestinian speech? It’s pretty clear that this is something that’s occurring, not just in local politics, but also at the federal level.

Sanchez: I would say it’s definitely happening worldwide. I think that’s where you really get concerned in terms of, quote-unquote “freedom of speech.” When I got fired and went public with it, so many people reached out to me from all parts of the world, saying, ‘Wow, solidarity.’ And to see so many personal stories, and hearing words of solidarity from some rightwing Republicans who were like, ‘We definitely don’t agree with what you’re saying, but on principle, this shouldn’t have happened to you.’

It’s scary when you try to limit or censor someone’s personal beliefs and words. Not only in the workplace; we see students losing scholarships, we saw other elected officials being censured for speaking up for their legislative bodies. Luckily for me, my council had my back 100 percent. I find comfort knowing that I made the right decision and I don’t regret anything about it. That’s one of the main reasons I became involved in politics—to start changing some of these systems that we have existed under for so much time.

Folks are told in different corporations and enti ties that ‘you can’t speak up on this because donors would not be happy,’ and I feel we’re seeing that with the presidents of some Ivy League schools. But I mean, my colleagues supported a ceasefire resolution, and we were one of the first cities in the country to do that. There’s been so many more after. Richmond, California also passed a resolution a couple of days before, and theirs was a more in-depth resolution in terms of calling Israel an apartheid state and for an end to the occupation.

Indy: Something else I have been thinking about is the power of language. What you just said about the City Council resolution: It just said ceasefire, rather than including language like the Richmond resolution that said apartheid or occupation or settler colonialism. And that dilution seems much more

( TEXT SOFIA BARNETT, KEELIN GAUGHAN, & ASHTON HIGGINS DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION CATIE WITHERWAX )

comfortable for some people, but it’s also a political statement on its own. What do you think about the ways that words matter here?

Sanchez: Even before I got fired, we passed a resolution. We put in a line saying that ‘the Providence City Council condemns all terrorism and ethnic cleansing,’ and it was literally one sentence. And we passed it. Because who’s gonna argue against that? Ethnic cleansing is bad, terrorism is bad. Seems simple. Shouldn’t be so political. I don’t know if you saw that the [Associated Press] put out [a headline stating] that 12,300 Palestinian minors had died. This conversation definitely has a few different layers to it, but the practical and short answer is that capitalistic, racist, fascist people are always going to tone-police oppressed people and they are going to use that not as a distraction, but as their main combative force.

Indy: Has the controversy surrounding your termination from McKee’s team impacted your interactions with constituents at all?

Sanchez: When I got fired, I had nothing but love and support from my direct constituents. I probably received over 100 messages from Ward 6 residents, even folks I had never had a very in-depth policy conversation with. Most of the stuff they care about is their neighborhood issues like when their garbage is getting picked up or whether their streets are getting plowed. But if you do that stuff efficiently and good and honest, they will be open to deeper conversations. I have a neighbor who probably emails me once a month about rat issues, and she sent me an email after I got fired. It was three or four paragraphs about rat concerns, but then there was a last sentence in there, like ‘Thank you for speaking up against genocide in Palestine.’ I was like, ‘wow,’ this neighbor who I’ve never spoken to about anything also believes in the right thing, and is showing support for me speaking up for what I think is the right thing.

My thing is always be there and be strong in your support and solidarity. We have to be united as much as possible.

FIONA FROHNAPFEL

VALERIE SKINNER R’25

BEAUTY IS THE BEAST

c Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest sacrifice at the altar of weird cinema, Poor Things (2023), has divided the critical pantheon. Torn between a celebration of the film’s extravagant Beaux-Arts aesthetics and a condemnation of its masculinist sexual politics, the critics have broken ranks and scattered like headless chicken-dogs, penning descriptors as diverse as “a credo for getting through life” and “a 141-minute mistake.” Among these discordant voices, however, one harmonious note rings with uncanny ubiquity: the film’s protagonist Bella Baxter is the Emma-Stone-shaped monster under your bed.

Bella, according to critics, is a “damaged animatronic doll,” a “horny Frankenstein’s monster,” and a “bouquet of unmitigated impulses.” Under the porcelain guise of a thirty-something Victorian woman, she conceals “a freakish history,” dwells in “bizarre surroundings,” possesses “peculiar habits,” and calls an “unusual guardian” God. Her beauty, indexed by a cascade of wavy black hair that frames her alpine skin, is “ungainly,” and her movements, so terrifically embodied by an Emma Stone with bright eyes and (literally) bushy tails —“herky-jerky,” “artykooky,” and “amphibian.” As the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis sums up, Bella is a kind of “monster mash,” a carnival of bizarre traits sutured together by the mad surgeon of contemporary cinema.

Bizarre, freakish, amphibian—the lexical ground from which this portrait of Bella Baxter emerges is as colorful as it is revealing, for it skirts around what it does not name: somatic-behavioral eccentricities that belie a significant deviation from the norm. Bella moves, fisheye camera trailing wonkily behind her, in the lurchy fashion of a tilting doll. Swinging her lanky appendages left and right, she drags herself happily around the cabinet of chimeric curiosities she calls home. In her free time, she breaks fine china for

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Disability Misrepresentation and Narrative Prosthesis in Poor Things

laughs, masturbates at the breakfast table, and spits out food she doesn’t like in the faces of dinner guests. When swept away on a world tour by the debauched lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella’s ability to follow social cues sees nary an improvement. Between a decadent Lisbon ballroom and a maximalist steampunk cruise ship, we see her dance with banshee-like abandon, talk to strangers without an ounce of reservation—saying to an elderly lady, for example, “I hope you use your hand between your legs to keep you happy”—and almost assault a crying child because, in her words, “the baby annoying.”

The secret behind these strange behaviors, one that remains hidden from almost everyone including Bella throughout much of the movie, is that her mad scientist “father” Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) made her by replacing her brain, dead after she committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, with that of her own unborn child. Hence the infantile discoordination and inchoate speech that critics are quick to point out; Bella is quite literally a baby in a grown woman’s body.

If the visible quirks that result from Bella’s condition look familiar to us and even elicit a chuckle here and there, it is because, as Letterboxd reviewer and disabled activist Sam Morton observes: “Emma Stone is basically doing r*tard face the whole way through this movie—with a character that’s basically a jumbled together list of disabled/autistic stereotypes.” Ouch. Reddit commenter u/leblaun similarly recalls his neurodivergent girlfriend crying in the theater because “the Bella character is so autistically coded” that “aspects of her neurodivergence were being played for big laughs amongst a mostly full theater.”

“Monster mash” and “a jumbled together list of disabled/autistic stereotypes”— two assessments

of Bella Baxter that share an unspoken affinity— both shed light on Poor Things’ (mis)treatment of disability representation. As Morton points out, the critics’ obsession with Bella’s “monstrous” behaviors reveal an unsavory if equally unconscious recognition of an intellectual disability. Dargis remarks, for example, that “there’s an obvious, unsettling disconnect between her body and brain,” yet she does not identify the significance of this clearly legible sign. Instead, she weaves a web of conspicuous descriptions around the fact of Bella’s disability to the effect of obscuring its conscious presence. Even for those who do dare name the film’s representation of Bella’s condition for what it is, such as Angelica Jade Bastién for Vulture (“She’s introduced to us as a woman with mental disabilities”) the identification falters and drops dead before critical thinking can even begin to take flight.

The most potent critique leveled against Poor Things, in fact, is not its careless deployment of disability stereotypes, but rather its framing of feminine liberation as a uniquely sexual experience. As many critics and lay moviegoers have pointed out, almost every stage of Bella’s path to self-discovery is initiated or accompanied by sex. An exhilarating first encounter with the outside world is followed by the discovery of masturbation; an international adventure that explodes into technicolor is bound to an increasingly burdensome heterosexual relationship; and even her induction into the fin-de-siècle Parisian socialist milieu coincides with the breaking of new sexual grounds—sex work and lesbianism. It has been argued, therefore, that Bella’s freedom is contingent upon her sexuality, that she is only as liberated as she is desirable. Unsurprising for a film written, directed, and produced almost exclusively by men (Stone herself is the only female

producer), Poor Things is ultimately complicit in the very patriarchal and objectifying structure that Lanthimos alleges to destabilize. As Mick LeSalle sums up: the film’s philosophy “defines a woman’s autonomy as the ability to be exploited and not care.”

What gets lost in this indictment, however, is Bella’s perceived psycho-somatic difference. As feminist disabilities scholar Rosemarie GarlandThomson summarizes, disability studies “questions our assumptions that disability is a flaw, lack, or excess” much in the same way that feminism “challenges the belief that femaleness is a natural form of physical and mental deficiency.” When pushed beyond pathology and physical impairment, disability, like race and gender, reveals itself to be “a system of representation that marks bodies as subordinate, rather than an essential property of bodies that supposedly have something wrong with them.” As a film that ties feminist liberation intimately with disabled subjectivity, Poor Things had the potential to be a fecund terrain from which gendered and disabled critiques flourished side by side.

Reproductive futurity, eugenics, and the sexualization of those with developmental disabilities are all highly gendered disability issues that could have enriched the film’s univocal feminism, especially within its Victorian-era setting. At least the absence of such an integrated approach could have stimulated a critique after the film’s release. (In the film, Bella literally faces the danger of having her reproductive organs surgically removed in an attempt to reduce her perceived-to-be excessive sexual drives, though this aspect of her story is consistently ignored by even the most militant of feminist critics). Instead, what has precipitated out of Poor Things and its critical reception is a curious inversion of what anthropologist Robert Murphy has termed “disability creep”—the tendency for disability to subsume all other aspects of identity upon its entrance into discourse. Due to the critical chorus’ negligence and neglect, the opposite has happened with Poor Things; Yorgos Lanthimos has been allowed to get away with an egregious misrepresentation of disability by flying under the feminist flag.

disabilities, the brain-body disjuncture trope has long been prevalent. Queer and feminist disabilities scholar Alison Kafer, for instance, calls the social construction of this phenomenon “embodied asynchrony,” a being-out-of-sync that has troubled medical professionals, family members, bioethicists, policymakers, and disability rights activists for decades. In the case of Ashley X, a young woman with static encephalopathy whose mental “development never progressed beyond that of an infant,” the fear of this asynchrony served as justification for surgical interventions on Ashley’s body. As Kafer summarizes, doctors implemented a two-pronged plan to attenuate Ashley’s physical growth—removing Ashley’s uterus and breast buds and starting her on a high-dose estrogen regimen—in order to stop her body from expanding beyond the grasp of her “static” (as in static encephalopathy) brain. Ashley’s caretakers feared that if she were to undergo puberty, they would no longer be able to turn or lift her easily, and would eventually have to give her over to institutionalized care. Bracketing the legal and ethical debates over the doctors’ use of forced sterilization, Kafer argues that Ashley has been from the beginning “represented as temporally disjointed, as an eternal child, and as threatened by her future self.”

This future self bears, significantly and to the chagrin of Ashley’s family, the expectations of normative womanhood. Her sterilization, as well as the choice of interventions involved, is justified in part by the imagined weight of her developed breasts, the potential discomfort of her menstruation, and the horrifying prospects of sex and pregnancy. What Kafer’s analysis demonstrates here is that the treatment of Ashley X as a disabled individual was always tied up with the patriarchy.. In other words, to push Garland-Thomson’s analysis one step further, the two identity formations are not only co-constitutive but mutually reinforcing.

father, a surgeon. A poor thing no more, Bella cut too.

Some disabled and neurodivergent viewers have found solace in this supercrip growth arc. @honestbird on Instagram finds, for example, that “the beginning was rough but seeing the growth through the phases of discomfort was so worth it. She never changed her core self, she only got more sure of herself along the way. I can’t let the audience not understanding it bother me.” u/ leblaun, whose girlfriend initially felt deeply marginalized by the portrayal of neurodivergence in the film, argues that “once the film assumes her subjectivity,” i.e. after she departs from home and the film transitions from black and white to color cinematography, “she is never laughed at, but laughed with. She learns about the neurotypical world and begins to mask her autistic tendencies, as real autistic people do, in an effort to conform with polite society.”

A statement from Manohla Dargis’ review succinctly captures the representational duality of Bella Baxter, as well as the eclipsing of her disability by gender: “She’s monstrous; she’s also a woman.” This construction not only conflates disability with monstrosity—a product, no doubt, of the film’s caricatural portrayal—but sweeps even this “monstrosity” under the rug as auxiliary. Womanhood and Bella’s transcendence of its limiting conditions, Dargis goes on to argue, sit at the heart of Poor Things’ political-aesthetic landscape. To balance out the asymmetric weight that has been assigned to Bella’s femininity, however, Dargis’ phrase ought now to be considered in reverse: Bella is a woman, yes, but she is also “monstrous.” Her disability and its gradual erasure by the film cannot be disentangled from the problematic trajectory of her sexual liberation.

As revealed to us in a gory surgery sequence early on in the film, Bella’s monstrosity is a result of her being an infant ‘stuck’ in the body of a grown woman. In discourses surrounding developmental

Bella Baxter represents at once the realization of the ungovernable “future Ashley” and the inversion of its fear-inspiring image. For Bella, it is her brain that has to catch up to the already-mature present of her body, and she does this with time to spare. Five minutes into the film, Bella has already graduated from spitting monosyllables (“Ba-ba”) to stringing together sensible albeit grammatically disjointed phrases (“Bella cut too?”). Godwin Baxter assures us of this advancement when he observes to his medical apprentice Max: “Language is coming. She is progressing at an accelerated rate.” We are compelled thus from the get-go to invest our emotional energy in the anticipated progress of Bella’s development. On this front, the film delivers exceedingly well. Throughout the dubiously short time span of Bella’s journey, the infant-woman masters English, reads Emerson, learns French and, by the decadently self-gratifying ending sequence in which she lounges midst a picturesque garden with her lesbian lover, doting husband, friendly maid, quickly-improving doppelganger/successor, and pet ex-husband-qua-goat, she is ready to pass an anatomy exam and become, like her recently deceased

A key marker of this progression that both reviewers note is Bella’s familiarity with the codes of “polite society.” In the black-and-white beginning of the film, a still-infantile Bella pleasures herself with gourds at the breakfast table to the absolute horror of her keeper: “Bella! Cease working yourself immediately! [...] In polite society that is not done.” This admonition seems to make an impression on Bella. Later, right before she takes off with Duncan Wedderburn, she asks him, “You did not see me working myself to get happiness, did you? It is not polite, I know.” And finally, on the steamship, when Bella forgets herself and asks an intrusive question, she immediately chastises herself, murmuring: “Polite society, polite society. I forgot.” Politeness is deployed here as a disciplinary apparatus that tames the unruliness of Bella’s desires, so potent is it that she internalizes its restrictive logic. Defined as, among other things, that which menaces a juridico-biological order, the monstrous is incarnate within Bella as she infracts the proper bounds—legal (she is unwed and a sex worker) and natural (she is a infant-woman)—of “polite society.” Yet, in the skirmishes between polite society and its repudiated Other, it is the former that reveals itself to be monstrous in its absorption of the latter through disciplinary means.

Throughout the film, Lanthimos belabors the point that Bella is on her way to becoming “just like us.” Consubstantial to her mental development, in fact, is her discovery of sex, music, food, and dance. She even goes through all the stages of a typical heterosexual relationship: intrigue, passion,

too. Disability is positioned here simultaneously as the antithesis to full humanity and that which leads to its realization. It is a prosthetic device that the film must cast off at the end lest its culminating humanity be contaminated, incomplete, or disjointed.

disappointment, anger, self-inebriation, boredom, disgust, and betrayal. She feels compassion for the wretched of the earth and experiences existential dread. The wrinkled brothel madam Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) is preaching to the choir when she tells Bella that “we must experience everything. Not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole Bella, makes us people of substance. Not flighty, untouched children. Then we can know the world. And when we know the world, the world is ours.”

Bella does, in the span of a few weeks, experience everything. She transforms from a “flighty, untouched child” to a person of substance, from a “bouquet of unmitigated impulses” to a ‘fully-fledged’ human being. By the end of the film, Bella’s furious outbursts and agrammatical blabber have all but disappeared. Her infant brain rapidly catches up with her adult body such that her intellectual impairment, as well as its attendant social incongruencies, hightails toward erasure. She doesn’t mask her ‘autism’ as much as she literally ‘grows out of it.’ Almost as soon as she enters the symbolic order by acquiring linguistic coherence, however, Bella begins to signify, to make sense, and we as viewers start to understand her behaviors, share her motivations, and empathize with her plight. She shifts from being an allegory for disabled subjectivity to being one for the human condition. The film’s plural title, Poor Things, testifies to the all-inclusive scope of the director’s intent. You, me, Bella, all of humanity—we are all poor things.

The issue here is not that Bella’s brain develops at a rate unrealistic to her condition—there is no ‘realistic’ way for an infant’s brain to develop in an adult’s body—but rather that this development, careening toward psychosomatic congruity, is equated with the process of becoming human. This, in turn, serves as the pulse of intrigue that jolts the film’s otherwise flaccid narrative forward. To borrow David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s formulation, Bella’s disability is strategically deployed in the film as a narrative prosthetic device.

Defined by Mitchell and Snyder as the “perpetual discursive dependency” of literature and film “upon disability,” narrative prosthesis uses disability’s construction as a social problem to fuel a story’s diegetic drive. In their famous analysis of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” Mitchell and Snyder identify disability as the primary narrative impetus, one that must be overcome or obliterated by the story’s end. Their careful reading demonstrates that it is precisely the social framing of disability as undesirable that transforms the individual experience of physical impairment into

a stigmatized abnormality destined for erasure. Disability as a prosthetic expedient must be cast off for the reinscription of able-bodied norms, and it is this reinscription that offers comfort to the reader. In the tin soldier’s case, narrative resolution comes when he is thrown into a fire and reduced to smoke. For Bella, the dilemma of her disability is solved via overcoming and manifests in the form of her becoming ‘cured’ and becoming human. A paradoxical construction thus lies at the rotting heart of Poor Things: Bella’s disability is framed simultaneously as an aberrance that needs to be cured—the cured state of mind/body coherence being a telos towards which the film impetuously hurtles—and the key to that cure. The metaphorization of Bella’s condition and its role as a narrative prosthetic device sets up the film’s psychic progression in two ways. First, Bella’s mind/body disjuncture, which she offers up so flagrantly to the laughter of moviegoers, and the expectation of its eventual erasure, acts as the narrative impetus that compels our investment in Bella’s journey. Will she become a ‘real woman?’ If she is capable of acquiring language, discovering sex, and desiring liberty, what other ‘natural’ human qualities might she discover as her brain develops? The second function that her impairment serves is to grant her absolute freedom in this quest for self-exploration. What makes Bella an incredible specimen of the human condition, as Emma Stone explains on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is the fact that she “doesn’t experience shame… Because she doesn’t judge herself at all or her impulses or really judge anything as a positive or negative experience—it’s all just a part of life and it’s all meaningful and all just interesting to

“Her disability and its gradual erasure by the film cannot be disentangled from the problematic trajectory of her sexual liberation.”

her.” Rather than a lived experience that effectuates stigmatization and differential treatment, Bella’s having the brain of a baby is understood as a superpower, an Edenic state of primitive perfection that predates the Biblical fall. “There is something really really exhilarating about people who don’t subscribe to all the ideas of what you’re supposed to be.”

Bella, however, does experience some degree of shame, or at least comes into shamefulness as she learns to follow the rules of polite society. And it is precisely this shame that paves the way for her humanity. Herein lies the downfall of Bella Baxter as an effective political allegory. By constructing Bella’s impairment as both a vehicle for feminist liberation and a pathological condition that anticipates its own elimination, the film tries to have its cake and eat it

Power must be reinscribed. The death of Godwin Baxter, Father-God par excellence, results not in the toppling of the patriarchal order but the assimilatory metamorphosis of his child into his mutilated image. We see this when Bella learns of her true history from a dying Godwin and decides rather momentously to become a surgeon herself. She then conducts surgery on her husband from her previous life, Alfie (Christopher Abbott), switching his brain for that of a goat and causing him to live henceforth on all fours.

“Baa baa,” we hear Alfie bleat pathetically in the film’s ending sequence, echoing Bella’s own first words, “Ba ba,” which she yells happily behind her father. This is the humanity that Bella comes into at the end of the film. The disabled/feminine throws away its crutches and sprints toward masculine/ able-bodied subjectivity. Order is reestablished, the cycle begins again, all is insidious and well.

+++

“I am finding being alive fascinating, so I will forgive you the act, but always hate the lies and trappings that followed.” These are the words that Bella says to her creator as he lingers at the threshold of demise. This statement, uttered with glacial clarity, reveals to us more about the humanity in Poor Things than any of Bella’s so-called humanizing experiences. She forgives Godwin for creating her condition because it isn’t so bad after all, and she’s right. To place blame on the fact of her impairment would be to deny her the full humanity that she always already possessed, even before she acquired language, read Emerson, and became a surgeon.

She is only able to come to this happy conclusion, of course, because her storytellers have chosen for her the resolution of overcoming. She could just as easily have been killed, sterilized, or burnt alive like the steadfast tin soldier—all a narrative prosthesis needs to work is its own eventual erasure. Bella lives on because, as an idol of Lanthimos’s false feminism, her story must be a triumphant one. Yet, by depicting her disability as monstrous and discarding it as prosthesis, Lanthimos undermines the very premise of feminist liberation that supposedly fuels Poor Things’ political engine. Bella cannot be an emancipatory figure if her victory is dependent upon the eradication of her disability.

The critics, like Bella, have forgiven Lanthimos for his monstrous construction. But in so doing, they leave behind the very same lies and trappings Bella despises, and that is unforgivable.

ANDREW LU B’24 claims.

~A Parabolic Prelude~

c I ran out of contact lenses a week ago because I’m careless and always forget.

Now, the new ones I ordered are stuck somewhere in Arizona. I zoom in on the map, magnifying first the little gray package icon and then the pin representing my home address, on the other side of the country. Red dotted line indicating path yet to be traveled. How did they get there? It said they shipped from Connecticut.

My left eye has always had perfect vision, but my right is bad enough that if I leave it uncorrected long enough, I’ll develop splitting headaches. All objects appear multiplied, blurrily extended, dislodged from themselves in a nightmarish haze.

It was different before the corrective measures. I was originally diagnosed with dyslexia. I was extremely clumsy. They only figured out the real problem because I started developing a lazy eye. The doctors said that my brain had learned to suppress the disruptive visual stimuli from the “deviant eye,” so I could function pretty normally by basically seeing just out of one. But over time, my brain had started to forget the deviant eye existed. I had to wear an eye patch over the good eye for a while, to force the bad one to gain strength. And then I got glasses. I have few memories of childhood.

I don’t have glasses anymore, because I’m careless and always break them. I haven’t gone this long without my contacts in a while.

Keeping my right eye shut at all times gets tiring. I open it and blink several times to allow it to adjust to the influx of light. My laptop screen looks like a deck of cards being shuffled. I press command-plus about seven times to enlarge the text to picture book size, which fucks up the webpage. The sidebars have taken over the screen, leaving barely any room for the body text.

It has been weeks since I ordered my contacts. The package seems to have disappeared; I can no longer find it on the map, although that might also be because I can barely see the map, only a fuzzy gray field.

It does appear that we communicate increasingly using images. Digital culture, especially communication on the internet, fragments language. Perhaps one could model it like this, with the average experience of language pulling itself toward the extremes of and images are left to fill in the middle. Following the laws of information theory, these two poles functionally approach each other. If a message is entirely signal with no noise, no new information is produced. If it is only noise, it communicates nothing.

completely legible: no nuance

a.k.a. a program or code

completely incomprehensible

a.k.a. infinitely interpretable

This diagram is too simple, though. Culture is not abandoning writing in favor of images. After all, code can be classed as a system of writing, albeit a rigid and binary one. In the paradigm of new media, no images can be created without it, and all images are written.

So, perhaps we are actually relying increasingly on writing to produce images. Our newest tool for image production, AI text-to-image generation, requires not only code but also an input of “natural” language to function (as in, “natural language processing model”). These text-to-image systems, like all programs, generate nothing without a command; a code requires definite relationships of cause and effect. So, if their purpose is to produce coherent, legible images, they must be modeled to interpret “natural” language prompts with minimal ambiguity.

DALL-E 21, the text-to-image generator by OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), is a neural network trained on a huge data set made up of images and corresponding text captions, mostly scraped from the internet.

First, the system is trained to match each image in the data set to its corresponding text pair. Both text and image inputs are tokenized and mapped onto entries in the encoders’ finite vocabulary. The image encoder reduces the 1 I use DALL-E 2 as my example because it is available to everyone (although with limited credits). OpenAI’s newest model, DALL-E 3, is available only to paying Microsoft or ChatGPT Plus users.

Over time, my vision will adjust back, excising the neural signals to the deviant eye like an atrophied muscle.

Or, maybe, it will have been too late. My brain can no longer forget the bad eye exists. The world will stay a place I don’t recognize.

Language, like my field of vision, will start to follow a logic I can’t explain. Words will also start to dislodge themselves from their meanings, too easily, like when you repeat a word again and again. Like something from speech has gone missing, maybe a dimension, like a 2D shape visualized in a 3D plane and rotated such that it looks like a line.

The edges of words, where one differentiates itself from another, will become blurry, replaced by strings of text that appear segmented into uniform tokens on a vectorized plane. Except the model is broken, so at each moment, they regroup into new combinations based on mysterious and undetectable parameters.

My contact lenses had translated the world for me; I had gotten so used to seeing defined outlines of things. Now, I need to impose a grid on the world I see to understand what I’m trying to think.

And then, after a while, I will learn this new field. I will begin to understand if not its rules, then at least its patterns.

dimensionality of the visual data into a grid of 32x32=1024 image tokens of 8192 possible values, and the text encoder breaks up the caption into max. 256 tokens, with a vocabulary size of 16384.

The text and image tokens are then concatenated into a single data stream and modeled autoregressively. Via what is known as a diffusion model, the network constructs a new image from a given prompt by starting with a square of pure Gaussian noise (i.e. random dots) and then successively generating a more and more ‘specific,’ i.e. noiseless, image, predicting each step based on both the input prompt and the text-image pairs it already knows.

AI image generators like DALL-E thus produce an unprecedented coupling between language and images through a translation process with the lingua franca of data.

Due to the inherent “black box” of machine learning, whereby the neural network produces its own patterns and rules from the data it is given, we can never fully ‘know’ its logic. However, because this process relies on a statistically projected link between caption and image based on data scraped from thousands of websites,2 the ideal image that corresponds to a certain text string is meant to be the most generic possible: a statistical average, a visualization of the internet’s Platonic ideal. OpenAI’s bias ‘correction’ can only go so far.

DALL-E’s translation mechanism precludes the production of metaphors, if one understands “metaphor” to mean the ability for one word or phrase to function in the place of another. It often does not understand figurative language, or language that veers too far away from the grammar of a prompt.

Furthermore, in “natural” language, no word or string of words has an essential referent. There is no way to ensure that what I mean when I write “cat” is the same as what you mean, or that you might not tear the word “cat” out of this paper and stick it into your textbook or on a street sign, or that this sentence might not be a poem, in which case all bets are off. In other words, all “natural” language is, to some extent, metaphorical.

2 DALL-E 3 was partially trained on “synthetic captions” that are “biased towards describing the main subject of the image” more faithfully than an average caption from a website on the internet, which might be completely unrelated to the content of the image it’s linked to. The DALL-E 3 research paper notes, though, that the synthetic caption model likely has its own biases.

Is our culture really becoming more ‘visual’?

it communicates nothing.

Prompt

Given the word “cat,” DALL-E, on the other hand, must choose from a million variations. At bottom, it cannot preserve ambiguity: it must select 0 or 1.

So, even as text-to-image generation produces an asymptotic relationship between text and image in the production of meaning, in effect, it actually seems to create an ever more extreme binary between the two:

written symbol → representation.

Both language and image become increasingly standardized.

Here is a fear: Over time, the production of images will become restricted to solely that which can be described, and nothing will be seen that we cannot name. In this case, is it possible to create an image that generates truly new information— that surprises?

Vilém Flusser had an alternate fantasy. In 1985, reflecting on the future of computational technologies and digital culture, the media theorist outlined his theory of the “technical image.”

The history of the human, he thought, could be described through the transformation of our relationship to images. The first stage of images made by humans (e.g. the drawings in the Lascaux Caves) were mimetic representations of the world. Then, in an effort to explain these representations, linear writing emerged to translate the pictorial surface into concepts. Linearity also allowed for definite explanations of the world, such as history and science, to come into being. Finally, around the time of modernity, we realized that the laws of ‘nature’ were not absolute but governed by contingency, entropy, and randomness. The world became a field of particles that could not be “grasped” or “represented” or “understood” in its entirety. It could only be calculated, based on laws and equations meant to reduce the unknowability of the world to a minimum. Thus, the era of technical images began: images are now created not as 1:1 representations of things believed to exist in the world, but as computations of abstract concepts, or texts. So, his image history looks something like this:

world without differentiation → images to represent discrete objects in the world → linear writing to explain those images + objects → text-images to compute the world produced by linear writing.

I hesitate to cosign the opposition between text and images Flusser sets up in his brief history of (primarily Western) culture. It functionally rids both ‘traditional’ mimetic images and ‘new’ computational images of any semiotic ambiguity, and of what is more likely a fluidity and constant interplay between language, images, and ‘things in the world’ (insofar as those categories could even be separated).

However, his definition of the technical image, written 40 years ago, maps eerily closely onto the age of AI image production via code, a technology which does preserve, and heighten, a text-image binary. Today’s images are, literally, computations based on unknown patterns taken from a set of hundreds of millions of data no human individual could parse entirely.

In the final chapter of Into the Universe of Technical Images, entitled “Chamber Music,” Flusser imagines a future wherein history, linearity, causality, and thus what he understood as traditional “reason” would be fully eliminated through new technologies’ collapse of space and time into an eternally present network of technical images. This would allow humans (and artificial intelligences, as the two would be functionally indistinguishable) true freedom for the first time: the freedom toward collective play. He compared this pure play of images to chamber music:

The basis for such music making is an original score, a program, a set of rules … In chamber music, there is no director, no government … To play for himself, each player plays for all the others. Each improvises together with all the others, which is to say, each adheres to precise rules (consensus) to jointly change them in the course of the playing. Each player is both a sender and a receiver of information. His goal is to synthesize new information to become more than the playing.

In other words, this passage describes the possibility of changing the relationship between signs through the collective shifting of the program that dictates those relationships: the ultimate “Death of the Author” along with the transcendental Cartesian subject, all creative production being a purely collective endeavor. Today, though, this techno-optimist fantasy is difficult to reconcile with material reality. Our tools are democratized to a certain extent; theoretically,

anyone can code their own AI image generator. But those that are the most widely accessible, and thus common to the most users, will never be a purely “collective” endeavor. OpenAI does not publish their code or many specific details about their training data, ostensibly to prevent misuse toward harmful ends by the public (deepfakes, for example). It has, however, outsourced its moderation of disturbing and offensive content for ChatGPT to laborers in Kenya for less than $2 per hour, as a Time investigation revealed about a year ago. The company has also faced several copyright infringement lawsuits in recent months; in December of last year, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works” to train ChatGPT. In a comment to the U.S. Copyright Office, one of OpenAI’s financial backers, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote that because the functionality of generative AI models depends on their ability to be trained on “an almost unimaginably massive amount of content,” subjecting the creators of AI to copyright liability would “either kill or significantly hamper their development.”

No technology can ever be separated from power, perhaps especially one that is to create photorealistic images of—theoretically—anything. It’s thus worth noting that OpenAI’s tools are not created to be ‘artistic,’ but to be practical (read: commercial). It’s fitting that the users that would benefit most from being able to instantaneously produce a standardized, generic image based on a standardized, generic prompt are probably marketing consultants and advertising agencies.

Of course, the future of writing-images more likely lies somewhere in a middle ground between complete anarchy and complete semantic authoritarianism. For now, I feel lucky to be a witness to the early stages of a radically new tool, and all the things it cannot yet do.

For, even with OpenAI’s strategic sanitization and prodding, the statistical average of all text-image pairs on the internet is quite strange.

Metaphor is beautiful because there is no way of determining how it works: contingency and randomness are a feature, not a bug.

A translation is also a kind of metaphor: one sign substitutes for another. DALL-E translates text into images, by a mechanism we can’t entirely discern and that often makes unexpected connections.

Furthermore, there will always be errors. And we all know errors are the most interesting part. An error is always a surprise.

For example, most text-to-image diffusion models, including DALL-E, are terrible at generating text from text.

According to OpenAI, this is likely because the text encoder’s tokens represent whole words or parts of words, which must be mapped onto letters in an image. Put simply, DALL-E is not coded to understand the semantics of human language. What results is a beautiful, varyingly recognizable gibberish:

the word "poem" Generate

the following text: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Generate

Future models, OpenAI’s researchers write, will “explore conditioning on character-level language models to help improve this behavior.” Mistakes will be corrected, parameters will be shifted. Tools will be optimized. For now, I appreciate the gap between input and output. It makes it fun to play.

Diagram of the DALL-E image generation process Generate

To play for himself, each player plays for all the others. Generate

a stern-looking owl dressed as a librarian, digital art Generate

Prompt generated by DALL-E’s “Surprise me” function. Most of DALL-E’s suggested prompts involve anthropomorphic animals participating in whimsical activities. a poem Generate

Finding Utopia in My Backyard

How Robert Moses Shaped the Future of New York

c It’s the last day of summer, and I am standing on the edge of a public pool with a shiny red helmet strapped onto my head. The pool is completely empty, a rarity in New York this time of year, and its surface shimmers in the sun’s harsh glow. Beads of sweat trickle down my back as the faded depth indicator etched into the ground informs me that the pool is 5 ft deep and diving is strictly prohibited. With one last moment of hesitation, I take a deep breath and jump into the air. My stomach rises into my throat before the tires of my bicycle slam against the faded blue pavement and send it hurtling back into my gut. I gasp for air, and my brother cheers from the sidelines before I plow through a patch of sewage and mud and crash unceremoniously into the pool’s concrete walls.

As I lay amidst twisted bike parts and dried-out leaves, I look up at the enigmatic steel globe looming above me. Known as the Unisphere, it is surrounded by defunct blue fountainheads and rusted metal grates that threaten to give way under the weight of your feet, and it casts the shadows of floating continents onto the ground below. The metallic skeleton was once the centerpiece of a sprawling urban oasis, and the abandoned fountains my brother and I had repurposed for stunt practice were once filled with glistening streams of filtered water. It was a symbol of hope and prosperity, a vision of a utopian future cast in iron and steel. Sunlight glints off the broken bottles and bird shit that adorn its top like a crown, a husk left to rot in a graveyard of dreams, and I think that it looks a bit pathetic.

Unbeknownst to many, it was also a symbol of greed and power, the culmination of a madman’s fantasy rendered in physical form. Now, over half a century after its initial conception, the only remains of the site’s former glory can be found in its decaying megastructures and a single unremarkable sign: “Welcome to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Home of the 1939-1964 World’s Fair.” I wondered what a World’s Fair was, or why they had decided to host it in a crappy park in Queens that nobody had ever heard of. I never considered who had created it or why. I assumed that it had some noble purpose, a kind of righteous impetus upheld by its creators. I would have never guessed that purpose was guided by a man who used the streets of my childhood to imprison minorities in a labyrinth of houses and homes. But as I stared up at the rusted carcass of the world hanging above my head, I could swear I felt the weight of the world resting on my shoulders.

The first World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows was conceived before the park’s flushing meadows even existed. Back in 1939, the area was a decrepit landfill affectionately nicknamed by locals “The Corona Ash Dump,” which would later inspire the “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. In a decade haunted by the aftermath of WWI and the Great Depression (and with the impending threat of the Nazi regime looming on the horizon), the public needed a boost in morale, and one man hatched a

plan to transform New York City’s filthiest example of industrial despair into a beacon of American progress. His name was Robert Moses, and he would change the way cities were built forever.

At the peak of his career, Moses was hailed as New York’s “master builder”. His ability to plan and execute public projects on a massive scale made him a figurehead of progress, and he gained popularity among white suburbanites who wanted a city that catered to the public’s needs. Simultaneously holding 12 public office positions, Moses funneled millions of dollars into his own organizations, established his own private police force, and molded the city to fit his idealistic vision. Over the course of his fifty-year reign, he created over 123 bridges, 658 playgrounds,

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15 public swimming pools, and 627 miles of roads. Green spaces flourished where there were once scrap metal, highways bridged gaping chasms, and tunnels burrowed deep under layers of concrete and asphalt. He transformed a city seen as a dystopian hellscape dominated by billowing smokestacks and cramped tenements into a place of newfound opportunity for white families and urban developers, weaving a complex system of intersections, freeways, and pathways to clean the city’s gutters and hide its homeless. New York City’s infrastructure became the foundation of modern urban development, and thousands of architects strove to follow in Moses’ footsteps. He did more than permanently alter the framework of just one city; he redefined

the way cities were perceived on a worldwide scale.

The lives of all New Yorkers are shaped by Moses’ legacy in one way or another, whether through the streets we walk, the parks we visit, or even the places we live. I grew up in a house sandwiched between two residential projects, darkly lit complexes fenced off from the rest of the world like urban fortresses of brick and wire. A few blocks north, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway stretches ominously overhead, an elevated highway guarded by a barricade of parks, pools, and parking lots. It blocks my neighborhood and its inhabitants from reaching the waterfront, where high-rise apartments and luxurious hotels dominate the skyline and crumbling homes are replaced by expensive condominiums. During the pandemic, colonies of tents and tarps appeared under the highway’s shadowy maw as the city’s unhoused population sought refuge from the cold. My family has lived within the boundaries dictated by these concrete since my grandmother immigrated to the US almost 60 years ago, back when Williamsburg, Brooklyn was a barren wasteland of warehouses and machinery instead of a tourist destination for the upper middle class.

But the effects of the city’s architecture on the lives of its inhabitants are not accidental; rather, they are the result of meticulously deliberate urban engineering designed to protect white elites and displace nearby minority communities. This effort was spearheaded by none other than Robert Moses, the city’s mastermind and self-proclaimed savior. Despite erecting public living spaces such as parks, pools, playgrounds, and highways, Moses’ creations also separated, destroyed, and displaced those that did not meet his utopian vision in order to maintain the sanctity of his spaces. As courts across the nation were outlawing racial zoning laws, highways such as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Cross Bronx Expressway were used to tear through minority neighborhoods and create ghettos cut off from the rest of the city. Public housing set aside for veterans became a tool to create redlined districts of cramped tenements, and low-hanging underpasses became barriers to prevent buses carrying poor Black and Puerto Rican teens from reaching the city’s beaches. Moses even supposedly kept the temperature of pools lower in primarily Black neighborhoods due to his belief “that African Americans didn’t like to swim in cold water.” He portrayed himself as the architect of the future, but the city of his dreams had little room for those he viewed as inferior.

It is within this context that the 1939 World’s Fair emerges. Looking for an excuse to further cement his legacy into the city’s landscape, Moses leaped at the opportunity to promote his image as “President of the Fair.” Barking orders from his office at the top of the Empire State Building, Moses watched gleefully as the valley of ashes transformed from a toxic wasteland into his magnum opus. He erected a Potemkin metropolis of pure white edifices and christened it “Democracity,” a gleaming paradise complete with an artificial garden of Eden populated by exotic flowers, extravagant fountains, and muscular statues of Greek gods. Titans of industry such as Ford, General Motors, Disney, and IBM

flocked to use the fair as a platform to promote their business, and soon the park became a shrine to commercial advertisements, scientific progress, cultural appropriation, and American pride. Alongside the zones dedicated to different countries of the world, the fair was more of a carnival of capitalism cloaked in multicultural diversity. There were moving walkways, flying cars, bobsled rides, and a mock Buddhist temple with a burlesque show that featured “the erotic temptations of a young Buddhist priest.” Albert Einstein gave a speech, a talking robot named Elektro smoked cigarettes, and the world was introduced to the automatic dishwasher, 3D movies, fluorescent lights, and the horrifically industrial Rotolactor. Moses’ fair directly led to the foundation of New York’s botanical gardens, the creation of Coney Island’s iconic parachute jump, and the unveiling of Disney’s “It’s a Small World” attraction. The sleek white city was not only a place for its guests to be dazzled by spectacle and glamor, but also a place for them to dream of a “better world.”

However, tensions were rising just beyond the fair’s pearly gates. As families and tourists explored the capital of Moses’ empire, over 500 Black workers picketed outside its entrance to protest the lack of Black employment in the fair. Despite being promised that they would not be discriminated against “in any way” by fair employers, Black workers were relegated to maids, porters, and performers in racist exhibits, such as portraying the scantily dressed “native Africans” in the popular “Jungle Land” attraction. The cost of attendance was also far beyond the price range of working-class families at the time, another barrier preventing impoverished minority communities from tainting the fair’s pristine appearance. In July 1940, after eventually hiring 300 Black workers following public backlash, the organizers began promoting a hastily-arranged “Negro Week” in a feeble attempt to challenge any claims of racial bias. While many influential Black figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Fiorello La Guardia, and George Washington Carver gave speeches during the event, they were either not compensated for their time or simply paid in admission tokens for their labor.

While a 60-foot statue of George Washington stared down at the speakers like a silent sentry, Nazi flags flew triumphantly above the pavilions of Germany and Italy. WWII would begin only 4 months after the fair’s opening, and despite the public’s disapproval of the totalitarian regime, the Foreign Office of the Nazi regime noted that the fair was hosted by “a private society whose president is very well-disposed to us.” In fact, one of Hitler’s first moves when rising to power in 1933 was to create Germany’s first limited-access high-speed road network. Known as the “autobahn,” it is generally regarded as the first official highway. To this day, a flagpole adorned with the Reichsadler still stands in Flushing Meadows, the eagle’s wings spread victoriously above the fluttering stripes of red, white, and blue. It is rumored to be a gift from the Nazis during the fair, but it has never been confirmed.

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Six decades after the last visitors stepped out of the fair, I press my cheek against the cool glass window of my family’s Honda Pilot and stare blankly at the cars flashing past on the freeway. Two concrete towers loom in the distance, the leftover pieces of a forgotten dream sticking out of the ground like ruins of an ancient shrine. My father points out the window and tells me that they’re UFOs, that their saucer-shaped domes came from another world, and I believe him. He started taking me and my brother out here many years ago, willing to endure a 30-minute car ride just to find a good place to bike. We pull into the parking lot outside the Hall of Science, a self-proclaimed “STEM playground” that sells vaguely scientific trinkets in its gift shop and rarely has two exhibits functioning at a time. A big rusted compass sits at its entrance with “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, TODAY” engraved on its base. I drag my bike out of the trunk and start pedaling into the Flushing Meadows, the wheels squeaking incessantly as I coast under the shadow of the Unisphere and the steel gray sky, past the saucer towers, past the faded skeleton of a circus tent and the decaying Greek statues hiding behind the trees. My brother trails behind as I pull into the front of the Queens Museum and hop off my bike. An icy blast rushes through the museum’s revolving doors, and my eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights as I walk down the hall to the great observatory. The doors creak open to the darkness of the void, and I step out onto a balcony overlooking New York City and all its inhabitants. From this height, the skyscrapers transform into thimbles and the bridges into toothpicks, pieces in an elaborate game of chess that spans the entire city.

The world appears to me in miniature because it is; I am standing at the edge of the sprawling Panorama, a replica of the five boroughs rendered at a hundredth of their size. Commissioned by Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, it was built by a team of 100 workers over the course of three years, painstakingly rendering 895,000 of the city’s buildings in formica board and polyurethane foam. It originally served as a dark-ride attraction at the fair, using a magnetic track and a dull narration to guide visitors through a “bird’s eye” view of the city, but was mainly intended to serve as an urban planning tool for envisioning Moses’ grandiose plans. I gaze out upon the vast sea of beige brick buildings before me, viewing them through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy instead of an unelected emperor who twisted neighborhoods and lives into matching his ideals. I stare down into a jungle of highways and roads and search frantically for my house, a small, white dot buried under barbed wire and overshadowed by glass towers. I try to find myself and my family amidst the madman’s plans, but all I find are utopias where we are gone.

LUCA SUAREZ B’26 would run in a walkable city.

The Dahiya Doctrine Unveiled

Israel’s Policy of Total War on the Palestinian People

c On December 29, 2023, South Africa brought forth a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The African nation accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people following the relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip starting from October 7. This prolonged assault has resulted in the loss of over 24,000 Palestinian lives––including 10,000 children––and has forced one and a half million residents to relocate to the border with Egypt where an Israeli ground invasion is imminent. The United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as specific “acts committed with intent to destroy, in

whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In its court application, South Africa asserts that Hamas’ attack on October 7, which it unequivocally condemns, cannot serve as a justification or defense for violating the Convention. The court announced its verdict on January 26, ordering Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide; however, the language appeared as a mere suggestion and did not call for an immediate ceasefire.

Nonetheless, Israel, alongside some of its key allies like the United States and Germany contested the ruling, arguing that Israel’s indiscriminate violence is justifiable as “self-defense.” Israel’s justification for targeting civilian areas

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and shelters in Gaza may come as a surprise to the international community, but for those living under Israeli aggression, it is the standard policy. Israel’s intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure is part of a decades-long strategy of asymmetric warfare known as the Dahiya doctrine.

Named after a Beirut suburb Israel destroyed in their 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the doctrine calls for the complete and disproportionate bombardment of civilian areas under ‘enemy control.’ This strategy requires destroying civilian infrastructure to eliminate human life. The dominance of Israeli occupation is not only inevitable, but is the ultimate objective of the Dahiya doctrine. As explained by

Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, head of the Israeli Northern Command during the invasion, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.” The tactics currently employed in Gaza mark the fourth instance in sixteen years that the Dahiya doctrine has been implemented, with each time causing more damage than the last. Each new military engagement is a perverse learning opportunity for Israel, a test to gauge its capabilities in asymmetrical warfare. Such brutal experiments enacted against entire populations do not raise any ethical concerns for the Israeli government. The continued survival of the doctrine rests on a systematic labeling of Arab civilian groups as “armed.”

The portrayal of this genocide as a war between Israel and Hamas demonstrates the very strategic implementation of the Dahiya doctrine. The most striking example of this has been the Israeli aerial assault on the very same Beirut neighborhood: on January 2, 2024 Israel killed six people, including senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri. Israel justified their attack by stating that the “Hezbollah-run neighborhood” was sheltering al-Arouri. Here, Israel exercises the power to categorize an urban area of around 800,000 people as a legitimate military target in the name of preemptive security. The Dahiya doctrine lumps together “civilians,” “countries,” and “armed groups” into the racialized category of “terrorist.” This inhumane categorization of all living targets by Israel produces a state of near-collapse and persistent human suffering. By unilaterally bombarding all civilian areas, Israel assumes the role of the solitary authority in determining who has the opportunity to develop systems and mechanisms capable of sustaining human life and who is deprived of such resources. Israel dictates the fate of millions of civilians residing around its borders: in Syria (through the bombings of both the Aleppo and Damascus airports), Lebanon, and indeed, the occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Dahiya doctrine extends its strategy of total warfare against civilians beyond aerial bombardment. The Israeli government employs a gradual yet lethal approach by withholding resources essential for sustaining human life. Israel’s current invasion of Gaza follows the Dahiya doctrine to its cataclysmic conclusion––over 50% of all housing units have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now succumbing to famine in what U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres describes as “the long shadow of starvation…stalking the people of Gaza.” The Israel Defense Force (IDF), for example, restricted food access in the strip since 2006, effectively banning the imports of seeds and fertilizer to cripple the region’s agricultural capacity. Given that civilian infrastructure is indefinitely deemed a viable target, necessities are mischaracterized as contraband, since they “nourish terrorists.”

The Dahiya strategy also seeks to eliminate Palestinians engaging in acts of survival. This

deliberate targeting attempts not only to cripple Palestinian society but make an example of those who dissent against the genocide and attempt to alleviate human suffering. A recent distressing story to come out of Gaza is that of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old who spent her last hours begging paramedics to come to rescue her as she remained the only survivor in her family’s car surrounded by tanks. The six-year-old child was killed alongside the two paramedics who were dispatched to rescue her. Likewise, Palestinian journalist and bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, Wael al-Dahdouh, has paid the ultimate price for his commitment to showing the world the horrors of Israel’s genocidal campaign. The Israeli military targeted his house in Gaza, killing his wife, three of his children, and his grandson. The attempted eradication of Wael al-Dahdouh’s family represents the logical conclusion of the Dahiya doctrine: an end to civilian life. The intention to kill medics, journalists, and civil servants, therefore, cannot be described as a ‘conventional’ war against a state army. It is a calculated genocide.

The Dahiya doctrine is deliberately absent in Western discourse on Palestine. Far from being an issue of visibility, the Dahiya doctrine shares the same ideological basis as Western coverage of Palestinians. Western coverage, similar to the doctrine, blurs the lines between civilian and military targets. The most notable example of this was Israel’s claim that Hamas’ headquarters lied underneath Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip. Numerous news sources quickly confirmed and publicized the IDF’s claims only to silently redact it, thanks to videos taken by Palestinian patients and physicians that rightfully showed the hospital’s complex void of “terrorist” presence. The Israeli government extended its misinformation campaign by alleging that Hamas had instead established an underground base below Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Here, the similarities between the Western media strategy and that of the Dahiya doctrine become strikingly clear through a constantly sliding categorization of civilian places into military targets until there are no more “places” to report on.

As the ICJ convenes for a second time to decide upon Israel’s 56-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories, Palestine finds itself already sentenced under the Dahiya doctrine. This doctrine sentences all Palestinians, irrespective of age, as ‘guilty,’ and therefore deserving of collective eradication. The repeated accusation that Palestinian houses, schools, hospitals, and municipal buildings are all bases for armed groups is not only a media and military strategy for Israel, but also specifically codified in the Dahiya doctrine. In the eyes of the Israeli carceral state, the entirety of Palestinian civil society constitutes a security threat and thus must be neutralized.

Such neutralization manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as in the most recent wave of famine and disease gripping Gaza or in the thousands of Palestinians still illegally detained in Israeli prisons.

Now, as the debate of whether genocide has been committed in Gaza trickles into academic spaces all over the United States, there has been a profound silence in supposed scholars of genocide studies. These academics that have produced scholarship around the tragic histories of genocides have largely refused to acknowledge the mere presence of Gaza. It is not difficult to imagine that twenty years from now, such silence will be ‘addressed’ through a ‘retro-speculative’ dialogue between ‘decolonial’ scholars who pride themselves on working in a ‘critical’ framework. These scholars, it should be noted, will only be speaking on these atrocities after it has been deemed professionally unthreatening to do so. As such, these institutions privilege an abstracted jargon when discussing real-world atrocities that allow their audiences to accept inadequate and out-of-touch solutions. Such regressive discourse has contributed significantly to our current reality, one in which a highly regarded international court offers a mere suggestion to a state actively committing genocide.

ABOUD ASHHAB B’25 hopes that you will join him at the PSL rally on Saturday.

A Critical Review:

Almond boyfriends, false gods, and Indie doesn’t care so much about mold

c I’ve often thought that I’m too critical: I’m a frequent noter of bad haircuts, indulger of celebrity plastic surgery speculation, and I’ve never been afraid to give a book two stars on Goodreads. But as I’m growing up—which, startlingly, never quite seems to end—I’m beginning to realize that maybe I haven’t been critical enough. While I was loudly questioning directorial decisions on Glee, there’s a lot that my childhood self should have questioned instead—like whether Hillary Clinton was truly the feminist icon I should be looking up to, or why I’d never seen a chocolate cow in real life.

So, I’m now trying to be more critical. I’m recognizing that Onitsuka Tigers are just another iteration of Sambas, and that those five star Amazon reviews are rarely true. I’m also, to be quite frank, learning to be critical of the readings my professors assign, of the newspaper I’ve been taught was the newspaper of record, and of institutional power I’d somehow just accepted. Bernie Sanders, it turns out, was far from the radical I was told he was.

This leaves me in a tricky spot, because although I want to be critical in the nuanced and smart way, I don’t want to be critical in the cynical and annoying way. And while I want to be critical of myself in a self-improvement way, I don’t want to do so in a self-hate way. God, can a girl ever win? I think, or rather, I hope that there’s a middle ground. Can I be critical when it comes to new authors on the adult fantasy scene, but not so critical when it comes to some mold on my raspberries? I guess it’s on a case-by-case basis. So for this issue, I’m writing about what to do when someone’s too critical, or when they’re not critical enough. Take it with a grain of salt, will ya?

Dear Indy,

My boyfriend’s always making comments about my food, and it makes me uncomfortable.

Sincerely,

My Boyfriend Thinks He’s The FDA

Dear MBTHF,

I get a lot of strange questions, but I’m honestly sorry to hear about this one. No one likes to feel monitored, and food especially is something we should never criticize. Indeed—and this is a minor example—I’ve had to ask my roommates to stop commenting on my frequent 11 p.m. bowl of plain spaghetti. It’s just something I like. Just like how I’m sure you know what you like and your boyfriend knows what he likes and so on and so forth.

But I digress. I think your question is also getting at something beyond the topic of food. If I were to pretend like I knew anything at all about your relationship (I don’t), I’d wager that your boyfriend’s behavior might stem from the pervasive belief among our generation that we should hold our partners to a “higher standard” than we hold other people in our lives. And while I see some of this argument, I think this logic is often used to justify basically unfiltered criticism.

We say things to our partners that we’d never dream of saying to anyone else in our lives. “Hey babe,” you might say with full authority, “that flannel looks hideous. Burn it.” And while all flannel should be burned, criticism can easily go too far: “Those jeans you like so much and fit you perfectly? That wash is out.” Or: “Your famous tomato sauce is actually famous for being inedible. Sorry.” The idea that we’re responsible for our partners becoming their “best selves,” or that we’ve been given some mandate of heaven to criticize to our heart’s desire, can be destructive. So while I’m not saying that partners shouldn’t communicate, I do think people need to remember that open communication doesn’t give a free pass for endless criticism.

To get back to your question, my main point is this: if I’m being generous, your boyfriend might not realize that his role isn’t to criticize. Tell him that his comments about food make you uncomfortable, and that, honestly, it’s none of his beeswax.

Then again, your boyfriend might just be a picky asshole. In which case, you should break up with him and continue eating whatever the fuck you want. Buen provecho!

Dear Indy, I fall in love with everyone. I idealize and fantasize, but how can I see people for who they really are?

Helplessly, Romantic

Dear Romantic, It’s surprising, perhaps even unbelievable, that you’re able to fall in love with not only one person on this campus, but several. Where, pray tell, do you find these eligible candidates? Yet I suppose this is the very crux of your conundrum: they’re not eligible.

Lucky for you, I have a great deal of experience with falling out of love. You might start by paying attention to the way they chew, or that little droplet of snot that collects on their upper lip when it’s cold out. Then imagine them unable to hail a waiter, or choosing the font for their Instagram story. You’ll slowly realize that they have no idea what dialectics means, which makes it all the stranger when they refuse to stop saying it… and sometimes, they only pretend to read that Cut article everyone’s talking about. I wonder, on your behalf, who told them their hat was cute, or okay? Was that comment in class brilliant, or did everyone else find it pretentious? Have you ever actually talked to them? Sacre bleu!

Yet I’ll also say this, because indecision is my truest vice: I’m not sure that you have to be more critical. A few weeks ago, I was talking to my friends about superpowers. Not like, running super fast (though that would be très chic), but rather how the unique ways we think about the world can be a bonus to our lives. It stuck with me, and so I wonder if maybe your superpower is seeing the good in people. Not everyone can fall in love so easily, and while I know that love can suck, I’ll say that every time I feel a burgeoning crush, I’m relieved. Relieved that I still have the capacity to do so, that I’m not a total grinch. So in that spirit, I’ll end with something sweet: in a world full of Grinches, don’t be afraid of being a Cindy Lou. Dr. Seuss, you genius you.

The Bulletin

3/1/2024

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Saturday 3/2 @1:00PM

Location: Providence WW1 Memorial, South Main & College St. Hands Off Rafah Protest

The genocide in Palestine has not ceased. “Israel” has recently threatened a ground invasion of Rafah, a stark escalation of ethnic cleansing as tens of thousands Palestinians continue to be murdered by the settler apartheid regime. On March 2, people will be taking to the streets across the world to fight for Rafah, Palestine, and a permanent ceasefire. Join the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Graduate Labor Organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation RI, Falsteeni Diaspora United, Showing Up for Racial Justice RI, and the RI Antiwar Committee on Saturday to do the same.

Sunday 3/10 @2:00PM – 6:00PM

Location: 340 Lockwood St., Providence, RI

Art Build for Family March for Palestine

Join Direct Action for Rights and Equality and Showing Up For Racial Justice RI this Sunday for Global Day of Action for Palestine. This event will create art and signs in preparation for the Family March for Palestine—snacks, masks, and art materials will be provided, and children are encouraged to join!

Arts

Thursday 2/29 – Thursday 3/7

Location: Avon Cinema, 260 Thayer St, Providence, RI

Providence French and Francophone Film Festival 2024

Looking to expand your film knowledge and brush up on your language skills? Stop by the Providence French and Francophone Film Festival taking place throughout the entire week. There are a total of 13 shows in French (with English subtitles) that hail from France, Senegal, Canada, and more. There will be two documentaries, two animations, and nine fictional stories. For more information, visit www.pffff.org/program.html.

Friday 3/1 @4:00PM – 5:30PM

Location: 94 Waterman St, Providence, RI

Opening Reception of “Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal”

“Art and Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal” was curated by Melaine Ferdinand-King, an Africana Studies PhD student. The exhibit includes visual art, writing, and music by Abu-Jamal to explore creative work amid the carceral state. It is open until Friday, July 19, but the opening reception is on Friday, March 1. View this in tandem with the John Hay exhibit, “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Portrait of Mass Incarceration.”

Tuesday 3/5 @7:00PM – 9:00PM:

Location: 60 Valley St #107A, Providence, RI

Drink and Draw

Come grab some food and peruse clothes, accessories, and art this weekend at African and Latina-owned arts organization, Public Shop and Gallery. Participating small brands include City Born Kings and Mind Matters Co. Make sure to RSVP and stop by (it’s free)!

Friday 3/8 @7:00PM

Location: 60 Valley St #107A, Providence, RI

Open Mic Night

Join Riffraff Bookstore + Bar and LitArtsRI for their monthly open mic night! All are welcome to attend or perform, and any creative practice ranging from poetry, prose, music, theater, etc. can be shared. If you do want to share your work, please arrive to sign up for a 5-minute slot at 6:00pm!

( TEXT EMILIE GUAN & RL WHEELER DESIGN ANDREW LIU )

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Sojourner House

Instagram: @sojournerri

Sojourner House hosts weekly housing clinics at their Drop-In Center for survivors of abuse looking for assistance with food and other resources. If you would like to contribute to their work, they accept shelf-stable foods and other items from their Amazon wishlist (linked in the bio of @sojournerri) that show the most urgent needs of their clients, which can be dropped off at 1570 Westminster Street, Providence, RI.

Wide Awakes Collective

Instagram: @wideawakescollective

Venmo: @WideAwakes-PVD

CashApp: $wideawakesPVD

Based in Kennedy Plaza, Wide Awakes is an organization that engages in mutual aid and direct action, centering abolition. Recent mutual aid requests include housing and transportation needs—if you would like to donate specifically, more information and direct donation links can be found on @wideawakescollective.

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!