The College Hill Independent V.30 N.2

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 02 | FEB 6 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 2

news 02 Week in Review

dash elhauge & dominique pariso

03 Oeconomicus Zoion malcolm drenttel

METRO 05 Caffeine Capitalism eli neuman-hammond

06 You See Me Rollin’ sara winnick

ARTS 11

Ya haram Charlie

13

Can U Hear Me Now?

athena washburn lisa borst

SPORTS 08 Left Shark

managing editors Rick Salamé. Stephanie Hayes, Zeve Sanderson news Dash Elhauge, Elias Bresnick, Sebastian Clark metro Cherise Morris, Sophie Kasakove arts Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz, Lisa Borst, Maya Sorabjee features Matthew Marsico, Patrick McMenamin, Sara Winnick SCIENCE Jamie Packs TECHNOLOGY Wilson Cusack SPORTS Sam Bresnick, William Underwood interviews Mika Kligler literary Kim Sarnoff EPHEMERA mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Polina Volfovich, Tristan Rodman design + illustration Alexa Terfloth, Ben Ross, Casey Friedman, Nikolas Bentel, Noah Beckwith Cover Editor Jade Donaldson Senior editors Alex Sammon, Greg Nissan, Lili Rosenkranz, Tristan Rodman Staff WriterS Alexandra Ruiz, Athena Washburn, Camera Ford, Dominique Pariso, Eli Neuman-Hammond, Erin West, Jane Argodale, Malcolm Drenttel STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Caroline Brewer, Lee Bernstein, Natalie Kassirer, Polina Volfovich BUSINESS Haley Adams, Kyle Giddon Cover Art Casey Friedman MvP Ben Ross

INTERVIEWS 17 Dreamin’ of Davis mika kligler

TECHNOLOGY 12 www.TheMan.com wilson cusack

EPHEMERA 07 Choo-Choo(se me) mark benz

LIT

15 Boy Meets World athena washburn

X 18 Small Dogs w/ Big Balls layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

fROM THE EDITOR S Last week, we listened to the warnings of the weathermen.

Our mothers called us. We called our mothers. We stockpiled. We hoarded. Flashlights, blankets, hand-cranked radios. We even filled up a can of gasoline.

At first, as the snow accumulated, we huddled together for warmth. We read Finnegans Wake by candlelight. When that grew tiring, a few words later, we whittled sticks. We milked a cow. The snow battered from above. A group of cats howled at the windows. Outside, the hydrangeas fell.

The cow died. Our faces blackened with charcoal and soot.

We grew lachrymose, and shared a Pinot Grigio. We liked the way it rolls off the tongue (when vocalized, and when drank). Running out of things to say to each other, we thought about all the people in the world existing without tongues. Then, we curated our Twitter presences. We carved arrowheads from whale bones. We inoculated ourselves from polio.

Needing shelter, we constructed elaborate forts out of the backlog of The College Hill Independent. We each had our own forts. We had passwords. We lay siege to each other’s forts. They had battlements. Then we took the revolver with us and scoured the countryside for food but came back emptyhanded. Outside we saw the shadow of a piper in the ashen waste but could not risk approaching. A sailcloth shuddered through the dunes.

By now, we have become accustomed to new colors, new geometries. The world around is all alight. –LB & KG

sam bresnick

FEATURES 09 Black and Blue paige morris

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ABANDONMENT

by Dash Elhauge and Dominique Pariso illustration by Rob Polidoro The Golden Ticket

Leave Your Troubles in the Snow A rosy-cheeked toddler breathes mist out from under a tightly pulled down cap. He wiggles back and forth in his car seat, struggling to gain momentum in his extremely puffy jacket.

He kicks frantically at the seat in front of him. His sneakers light up. He stretches his shivering fingers in the direction of his sister, who licks frozen snot from under her nostrils. There are tears stuck to the collar of her jacket. Her lips are blue.

Eeek, what a disturbing image to kick off your Friday with. Hopefully you’ve got a party to go to tonight. Maybe you can have a few drinks and forget about the nasty moment that arose when you shrugged and thought, “maybe today’s a good day to support an amazing local publication.” You should sip some wine, try and put it out of your mind. After all, that’s what these children’s parents did.

Forty-six year-old Jennie Chang and forty-one year-old Christophe Lucas left their two toddlers in the car while they skipped off to a wine tasting at the upscale restaurant Ris, in the West End of DC. It was 28 degrees out and the heat in the car was not running. They were gone for over an hour. Eventually someone noticed the two children in the car and called the police, who proceeded to arrest Jennie and Christophe.

Of course, we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about Jennie and Christophe’s parenting skills. As they told the police, they did leave behind an iPhone with an open line to monitor the children. And besides, Jennie and Christophe might have meant to only stop by the wine tasting. Maybe Christophe is a chatty Charlie, and Jennie kept saying “honey, we have to get back to the children,” but Christophe couldn’t leave because as he’s explained to Jennie like a million times now it’s rude to interrupt him while he’s is in the middle of a conversation, and maybe Jennie kept insisting that they need to go but then she overheard someone saying that the Seahawks were right to throw on that last play of the Super Bowl and her left eye started twitching that way it does when she’s angry (which Christophe keeps telling her is bound to give her astigmatism one of these days) and she charged over with fists clenched to set things straight and maybe, in the process of relentless politeness and brave defense of proper football strategy, Jennie and Christophe simply couldn’t make it back to their children in time.

Another explanation is that the couple, who live in a townhouse and own a Volvo, just didn’t want to shell out money for a babysitter, or the $10 for valet parking, during which a valet surely would have said something along the lines of, “umm, you seem to have left two tiny humans in your backseat.”

Either way, the courts of Washington, DC seem to frown on this kind of behavior, and our dear Jennie and Christophe are facing charges of second-degree cruelty to children. They could see up to ten years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

That’s enough for an 1870 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. But the worst news is yet to come for Jennie and Christophe: they don’t serve wine in jail. –DE

february 6 2015

We have, all of us, been guilty of it at some point in our lives.

We’ve turned on the TV and stared deep into the soulless, dead eyes of Ryan Seacrest as he crows, “we’re in the business of making superstars and this year, business is booming,” without the faintest trace of irony. American Idol has somehow reached its 14th season. I, as a young child of six, was indoctrinated back in the show’s early days when my family would gather each week to watch. We rarely made it to church, but American Idol was sacred. Every Wednesday and Thursday at 8pm, no matter what, we made it to the living room to tune in. And realistically, not much has changed since Idol’s Golden Age back in 2002: the rotating panel of borderline-celebrity judges, the tired song covers, the wannabe contestants. This week, viewers met Anderson Footman, aptly nicknamed “Hollywood,” as he made his bid for a golden ticket to the sunshine state. Footman, 22, moved to New York City three years ago and found himself a member of a population that has reached record high levels this month—New York City’s homeless.

America loves an underdog—at least on reality TV. Footman, gifted with a strong singing voice, wowed the judges and is on his way to compete with other superstar hopefuls all vying for the same dream that could change their lives forever. He has already, reportedly, moved out of the shelter he was living in. This is where we fade in the hopeful music, and Paula, or J. Lo, or Mariah, or whatever incarnation of bedazzled diva they found this season, gets misty eyed.

Of course, back in NYC, 59,068 people don’t get to watch Footman because they don’t have homes, much less TVs. The number of homeless has spiked nearly 10 percent since Mayor de Blasio took office, forcing an administration that campaigned on ending inequality to house many of these families in decrepit tenements already condemned by city inspectors. These buildings, known as “cluster sites,” have wracked up hundreds of code violations. Multiple companies manage these buildings and profit from contracts and subsidies granted by the city; while they hold families in apartments outfitted with temperamental heating, peeling paint, and partially collapsed ceilings.

The city is making plans to rectify the situation, which include converting the buildings into permanent housing and cutting subsidies to cluster landlords. But one can’t help but wonder how realistic these plans are, considering that the city hasn’t even succeeded in getting the buildings up to code.

It is surely a complicated problem: a strapped shelter system with far more families flooding in than going out. Our friends at American Idol would cue footage of Footman busking now, if they could, but this isn’t television. –DP

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SYRIZIAN GREECE: DEMOCRACY 2.0?

by Malcolm Drenttel illustration by Pierie Korostoff

Last week, on a warm evening in Athens, Alexis Tsipras stepped on stage to announce his party’s victory, declaring through a wide smile that: “the new Greek government will be ready to cooperate and negotiate with our partners for a fair, mutually beneficial, and sustainable solution for Greece.” While his words could be easily mistaken for any political victory speech—a supportive spouse on the sidelines, party flags waving in the breeze, abstract hopes for the future—they mark a critical moment in the ascension of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza.

This election will have far-reaching implications for the debt-strangled nation as well as the European Union at large, and the young party’s success may well be a referendum on the failed Eurozone policy of austerity.

The revolt’s origin In 2008, when most of Europe was rocked by the economic downturn, Greece’s problematic status—like that of other debt-ridden countries—was not immediately clear. The downgrading of the nation’s debt to junk bond status in 2010, however, signaled a major change. After almost a decade of rapid GDP and debt growth, the country was unprepared for a recession. Without the ability to sell bonds, Greece had no reliable source of income to manage its debt and was thus poised to default on its loans. This disaster birthed the Troika—a chimeric assemblage of the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Eurozone—which staged two bailouts of the Greek economy totaling around €240 billion. These bailouts were secured in exchange for legally-bound austerity, or moves by the government to reduce spending and increase revenue. A total of seven austerity packages were passed between February 2010 and July 2013. The packages cut salaries and pensions, altered laws regarding firings and overtime pay, raised the retirement age from 61 to 65, raised taxes on all classes, called for huge layoffs in the public sector, and made plans for privatizations worth €50 billion.

Following the second of these packages, Cephas Lumina, a Zambian UN expert on foreign debt and human rights, warned that further austerity could threaten “the enjoyment of human rights by the Greek people, particularly the most vulnerable sectors of the population such as the poor, elderly, unemployed, and persons with disabilities.”

Many Greeks agreed, and each package was met with clashes—most notably on May 5, 2010, when upwards of 100,000 protesters marched through Athens, and major unions organized a nationwide general strike which shut down most public services for the day. In the almost five years since the first bailout, the deficit has shrunk and Greece’s debt is now rated well enough to be traded on the bond market. During the last quarter of 2014, the Greek economy was the fastest growing in Europe. While these numbers seem to show that austerity has succeeded, this perspective fails to account for the fact that the people have not fared quite as well as the economy. While general unemployment stubbornly hovers above 25 percent, it is around 50 percent among those under 25. For those still employed in 2013, wages descended to levels not seen since the late 1990s. According to the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research more than a third of the population was living below the poverty line in 2013.

The disconnect between a growing GDP and a continually suffering population is reflective of the inequity of the situation. The people of Greece have been told to foot the bill for a crisis born of a broken system and a corrupt government.

A turning point Founded in 2012, Syriza has gained popular support by framing itself as a populist reaction to the perceived injustice of the austerity. Many feel that the country’s economic struggles should be blamed on the credit rating agencies’ missteps, or on the government, which Transparency International has consistently ranked as the most corrupt in Europe. Tsipras and his supporters agree, further arguing that Greece’s dominant parties—the center-right New Democrats and the center-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK)—sank the country’s prospects by conceding to the EU and the debt-collectors. The Syriza platform is founded on a plan to renegotiate the terms of the bailout. Their goal is to reverse the austerity measures so that the new government can start rebuilding the economy, rather than punishing the people for errors made by previous governments.

Syriza cites the London Debts Agreement of 1953 under which German war debt was forgiven by the allies as a historical example of leniency among the Eurozone countries. Furthermore, they claim that Germany still owes hundreds of billions of Euros in reparations to Greece for the damage done to the nation and the lives taken during the war. This argument is particularly politicized as institutions of the powerful German economy are the most important voices among the troika’s many heads. While Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been steadfast in insisting that the troika will not forgive any more debt, the possibility of a Greek default could force the group’s hand. While a default would be economically painful for the Eurozone, the effect on public sentiments is particularly worrying. The David and Goliath narrative of Greece taking down the austere Troika has generated popular support throughout Europe, and there is also fear that the destruction of a member state would be fuel to the flame of those doubting the EU’s legitimacy, and could provoke further electoral backlashes.

In the US, every election is hyperbolically referred to as a “referendum,” as though the biennial transfers of power reflect more than deep pockets and successful advertising campaigns.

In contrast to our stalled political system, the Greek election is in fact a referendum on the

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country’s willingness to accept brutal austerity at the cost of remaining in the EU. While Syriza only received 37 percent of the vote, considered alongside other anti-austerity and euro-skeptical parties—including those on the right—the percentage of voters in opposition to austerity is well above 50 percent. Since the founding of the EU in 1993, this is the first example of a radical leftist, anti-EU party stealing national control away from an entrenched political establishment. The Greeks have voted for centrist governments for decades and recent polls show they are now ready for something new. This referendum has given the new leaders a clear mission: end austerity, build a new Greece.

Since taking office Syriza has softened its tone, already backing away from demands that half of Greece’s debts be forgiven. They are, however, proposing changes including the rehiring of all public employees laid off during austerity, a doubling of the minimum wage, and a massive overhaul of the tax system (the country’s tax filings are notoriously corrupt, as evidenced by the fact only 200 Greeks declared incomes over €500,000 last year). Noticeably, the party has been conspicuously quiet when explaining what changes will be made to avoid another crisis down the road. If Syriza takes the people’s referendum seriously as a call for change, they might do well to look for inspiration in the history of leftitst solidarity in Greece.

The cooperative model In a 2013 article published in the Journal of Regional Socio-Economic Issues, Christy Petropoulou explores the history of “Solidarity-Cooperative Economies” in Greece. Following the Metaxas Regime of the 1950s, the Greek economy began “a gradual shift … to more consumer models, [while] the political importance of the cooperative organization flagged.” Greek cooperatives were fundamental, playing major roles in healthcare, education, agriculture, industrial production, and the feeding of the poor. Since the 1990s, cooperatives have once again been on the rise, with an uptick in efforts since the beginning of austerity. Having realized that the structural adjustment is weighted against them, poor and ostracized Greeks are now looking for success in solidarity. Recent squatters cooperatives have reclaimed urban spaces in a number of major cities, others focus on uniting women so as to increase family income and raise social status, and agricultural cooperatives support many of the more than 800,000 farms in Greece, the majority of which farm fewer than 25 acres. Cooperatives build community, support local business development, and keep capital circulating locally: exactly what the recent electoral shift has suggested Greece wants more of.

The most notable recent cooperative happenings in Greece have formed around the antimiddlemen movement. Covered recently by The New York Times, and examined in detail by Theodoros Rakopoulos in a 2013 article in Anthropology Southern Africa, this grass-roots movement has grown up across Greece as a means of fighting corruption, raising profits for producers, and lowering costs for consumers. One organization of which Tsipras was once a member, Anihti Poli (“Open City”), claims that its markets lower prices by 60 percent by cutting bribes and middlemen out of the equation. Rakopoulos’ article focuses on the field work he did with RAME, a squatters cooperative which organizes a farmers market in Athens, and boasts prices far lower than those of the nearby supermarkets. RAME’s members are highly skeptical of the government, which they see as bloated with corruption and inefficiencies. This movement has blossomed under austerity by blotting out both bureaucracy and corruption, and the Syriza government might do well by trying to expand this system rather than simply trying to regrow the oversized Greek public sector.

Grecian solidarity What could Syriza do if it was to take inspiration from the cooperative movement? The first change needs to be the eradication of corruption. Obviously easier said than done: corruption is rumored to result in the exchange of €3.5 billion per year in Greece. That the cooperatives have managed to do business without bribery is radical, and is therefore the movement’s proudest claim. Secondly, the government could pay attention to the success of grassroots, decentralized networks of solidarity. The anti-middleman movement matured with no government support, and did so through a collection of localized groups tailored according to the particular needs of each region. If Syriza were to encourage an expansion of the program, the savings visited upon Greek consumers could be impressive. However, the expansion would need to cling to the decentralized model if it were to avoid the activists’ assertions that the new government will be unable to eradicate the state’s inefficiencies. Similarly, rather than luring job creators and housing developers into the country with tax breaks—a failed policy which, like austerity, relies on decisions made from above—government spending could go towards the formation of new workers and housing cooperatives. By using public funds to develop from the bottom-up, these programs could focus on the actual needs of the Greek people, thereby appropriately and directly responding to the crisis of jobs and housing.

The solidarity movement is growing outside of Greece as well, and has developed a number of methods of resistance that could fit well in a restructured Greek economy. For example, the new government could begin to shift its trust away from the banks (which have consistently failed both the country and the people), and instead encourage the formation of local credit unions so that capital stays in the communities that create and need it. As another grassroots system, credit unions might avoid the bureaucracy and corruption of the national banking

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

system by forming according to the needs of the communities that they serve. Similarly, Syriza could organize a system of participatory budgeting whereby citizens vote directly on budgets, such as has shown great potential for communities in Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

This could help to alleviate fears that the government is disconnected from the citizemnry, and would reinforce the message that Syriza understands the significance of this election’s referendum.

If Syriza manages to convince the EU to restructure the bailout—no small feat—they will likely have only one chance to rebuild Greece. By taking plays from the cooperative movement, the new government could find a model for small-scale, sustainable, solidarity-oriented economic growth, which is fitting with the struggling nation’s needs. That these organizations flourished under austerity shows the financial viability of a well-run, solidarity-oriented system of cooperatives. The New York Times article on the movement quotes a farmer as saying, “The goal is not to destroy the old market system but just to slow it down and get it to change.” By slowing down, Syriza could find the time to enact the change needed in the economy as well as the government, while offering immediate help to the Greeks struggling most under austerity.

These systematic approaches may not deliver the immediate GDP growth of a huge stimulus package, but they might improve quality of life for the Greek people with less debt in the future. In sticking to its radical foundations, Syriza could demand that the new economy be judged by its statistics of literacy, nutrition, housing, and quality of life, rather than according to the abstract GDP. Opposition to established financial systems is growing in Europe, and Syriza is in a position to lead the resistance. Following the Greek electoral success, more than 100,000 people marched in Madrid in support of Podemos, a radical anti-eviction, anti-austerity, and anti-establishment party that formed only a year ago. On the other side of the spectrum, far-right parties win more elections each year, most notably the National Front in France and UKIP in the UK. The localist solidarity movement is in a unique position to unite forces on the right and the left against the dominant economic politics of the EU. Hatred is often inseparably linked to economic fears, and there is a possibility that far-right opinions on immigration and social issues might be mitigated through successful economic change. These Euro-skeptical forces have been waiting for a prominent radical group to lead the charge, and the people of Greece have given Syriza the chance—nay the referendum—to be that group.

MALCOLM DRENTTEL B’18 has abstract hopes for the future.

FEBRUARY 6 2015

NEWS

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THE 'NEW' PROVIDENCE? Thoughts on the Past and Present of the What Cheer? City

by Eli Neuman-Hammond illustration by Margaret Hu “We are no longer the industrial city we used to be; but that’s alright. We have to build the New Providence, along with a new economy, a new identity, and a new purpose,” said Major Jorge Elorza as he was sworn in last month. Governor Gina Raimondo echoed his sentiments in her inaugural address, speaking of an imminent “Rhode Island comeback.” Once the cradle of industry in the Americas, Providence is now a largely forgotten city, dwarfed by its neighbors Boston and New York, in addition to its own triumphant past. Providence’s tallest building—the affectionately monikered ‘Superman Building’—was built in 1928, and has stood empty for the past two years as a monument to Providence’s ever-fading economic presence. The city’s net population has increased by a mere 2,397 people since 1900—it rose by 78,000 early in the century, fell by 97,000 in the post-war decades, and finally recovered 21,000 in recent years—while most of the other large cities at the time have since grown by the thousands and millions. The state of Rhode Island is plagued by the fourth highest unemployment rate in the country and a massive deficit, which explains why people lack faith in Providence’s job market. Exodus only exacerbates the vicious cycle. Downtown Providence is suffused with a sense of waiting. Perhaps it’s the lack of big-city bustle; maybe it’s the absence of a subway system or heavy traffic. Whatever it is, one can’t escape this feeling that the whole place—the sidewalks, the gray slabs of brutalist structure, the eclectic old banks and hotels, the umpteen empty parking lots—has been like this for a long time, despite a sad list of efforts over the past few decades to rejuvenate the city.

How did Providence go from industrial hub to stagnant city? More importantly, where will the “Creative Capital” go next?

Providence’s Rise to Prominence I. Pre-Industrial Providence Providence’s founding story is haloed by mythos: Roger Williams, an ultra-tolerant rebel from Massachusetts Bay slips away in the middle of the night to found what will become Providence, a humble city defined by the moral resolution of its leader. Williams and a small cohort of likeminded settlers developed the land for farming purposes, took advantage of the Narragansett Bay’s natural resources, and subsisted on a meager economy of self-sufficiency. As the colony grew, it began a more substantial trade with other American colonies and other nations, and the city adopted an outward-oriented mercantilist economy. Concomitant with the city’s growth was its active involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which proliferated in the young city. One out of every six slaves brought to North America came through Rhode Island’s ports.

II. Expanding Industry Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the wealthy abolitionist Moses Brown began to experiment with water powered cotton-spinning mills. At the time, Britain had a monopoly on cotton mill technology, and they vehemently protected trade secrets from eager outsiders: anyone with knowledge of cotton mill technology was prohibited from leaving the country. Nonetheless, certain enterprising Americans hoped to draw trade secrets from Europe by offering lucrative rewards to anyone who understood how British mills operated.

In 1790, Samuel Slater, a young British mill apprentice knowledgeable about the technology, heard of Moses Brown, and sought him out in Providence. Together they built the first American cotton mill just north of Providence and the Old Slater Mill, which still stands today. By 1809, Slater, Brown, and their associates had built almost 30 mills in the Blackstone Valley. Providence adapted well to the economic shift; its narrow, quick-running rivers were ideal for spinning mills. Traders invested in the industry, a robust domestic transportation network was built, banks sprung up to fund new projects, and people of all ages worked in the mills.

III. Prosperity—and plummet Providence flourished as an industrial city throughout the 19th century, and then rode the wave of demand for textiles and weapons created by World War I and II. Massive population growth accompanied the city’s rise as an industrial center: the population doubled between 1830 and 1865, then again between 1865 and 1880, and once more between 1880 and 1910, making it the twentieth largest city in the country. The city’s more than 1,000 manufacturing businesses provided almost 50,000 jobs for its citizens. Up sprung a vibrant working class culture, whose constituents ate out at all-night diners, travelled on the city’s electric trolley system, and purchased new mass-produced luxuries at myriad department stores.

With the second highest wealth per capita in the country, Providence was prospering.

But around the middle of the twentieth century, something changed. Providence’s population peaked at 253,504 in 1940, and then plummeted by nearly 100,000 over the next four decades. Since then, growth has been sluggish, and the city is nowhere near its heyday size. The industrial economy that brought Providence to such heady heights now seemed to weigh it down in equal proportion. The culture, practice, and space of an industrial economy had become so engrained in Providence that when this culture reached its limit, the city failed to transition out of it.

The Coffee Shop Economy For a while now Providence has floated on in a state of limbo, surviving and continuing to serve as a home and community for many, but without much of a role in a national or international context. The city, furthermore, is centerless, without any one locus of action or defining space. Downtown is in major ways oriented around consumption, rather than production, with institutions like the Providence Place Mall taking center stage.

Elorza envisages a coffee shop economy for Providence: young, hip people drinking lattes in and around the recently renamed ‘Knowledge District,’ thinking up the future of the world and turning their ideas into high-value, marketable technologies. A key element of this vision is the expansion of the “eds and meds” sector of the city, a nickname for the various colleges and hospitals. Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University already account for 10 percent of the jobs in the city, but need substantial growth to be anything near a saving grace for Providence. This gets into a few conflicting tensions: on the one hand, the city wants establishments like Brown University to expand, and (hopefully) bring new jobs and vitality into the city; on the other hand, the more that these establishments expand, the more of Providence’s property ends up in the hands of tax-exempt owners, which puts the city under even greater fiscal pressure. As it stands, 40 percent of the city is owned by non-profit—and therefore tax-exempt—institutions, a massive portion of the city’s tax base. Another thorn in the side of the ‘meds and eds’ plan is the annual flight of college graduates from the city: two out of three college grads leave Rhode Island after getting their degrees. Then who will buy all those lattes?

The plan to expand Providence’s knowledge economy goes in tandem with its rebranding as the “Creative Capital.”

For years the many expansive and empty industrial spaces have provided cheap shelter to creators of all sorts, from painters to musicians. The ventures of creative citizens, in addition to contributing to the city’s economy, have the potential to make the city more attractive as a home and center of culture.

Then again, they also have the potential to attract wealthy developers to working class communities, eager to cash in on ‘cool,’ diversifying neighborhoods. The unhappy result of this process, which begins with new people coming together, is all too often homogeneity.

Another barrier along the road from post-industrial wasteland to “Creative Capital” is the historically paltry support for the arts coming out of City Hall. This year the Rhode Island State Council On the Arts awarded only $140,000 to schools, organizations, community centers, and artists to promote their projects and practices. However, in the most recent elections voters approved a plan to borrow $35 million to fund arts and cultural organizations in the state. Hopefully the $23 million of this sum that will go to arts organizations will bolster Providence’s creative metamorphosis.

On the campaign trail, Elorza expressed particular optimism about reviving Providence’s seaport, a move that would reconnect Providence to its pre-industrial past. The Mayor believes that expanding Providence’s exports would create some 1,500 new jobs in the city. The port is one of two in New England with a depth of 40 feet, which gives it an advantage over shallower ports. Establishing more international connections would also engage Providence in a more global economic network. This, in addition to new direct flights between Providence and Germany, might help the city establish connections outside of the regional bubble. Also, these jobs would be an important counterbalance to the imagined jobs in the city’s technology sector; Providence is mostly a blue-collar community with a large immigrant population, and over-investment in an exclusive knowledge economy for tech-savvy college graduates risks alienating this job-deprived demographic. +++ It’s unclear what’s in store for Providence. It’s certainly due a change in direction, and if trust between the people and the powers that be can be mended, after years of unfulfilled promises and questionable investments, perhaps the government will be able to make big policy moves once more. And hopefully the people of Providence don’t get left behind in the process.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18 is a gray slab of brutalist architecture.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BIKE LANE

by Sara Winnick illustration by Pierie Korostoff

Home. Backpack full: picture books, pencils, crayons, flash cards. Helmet on.

Slight uphill of George Street, not so slight downhill of George Street (peddle fast: ignore classmates noticing helmet). Wrought iron fence. 1857 1886 1840 1903.

Right on Benefit Street no stopping. Cobble stone, cobble stone, street lamp, cobble stone. Kid with dyed hair in all black on a skateboard. Smile to a pissed-off driver and left at the four-way on College. Downhill.

Pray for green light, working brakes.

Cigarette breaks on library steps. Rolling stop: over Providence River, under Providence skyline. Old buildings with nice moldings, reflected in windows, reflected in water. Above an old brick arch.

Men in suits and women in suits and long lines at Starbucks. Yellow awnings of Au Bon Pain. Tea lights over Westminster. Left towards Weybosset.

College grilled cheese, college hipster tees, college margaritas, and college froyo. The white busses of Johnson and Wales. Girls in leggings, boys with gym bags, Nikes.

BUY TICKETS TO THIS SHOW in blinking Broadway-imitation lights. PARK HERE, PARK HERE, PARK HERE. Rolling stop on the bridge, over Providence highway under Providence stop light across from Providence homeless shelter. Cigarette break on sidewalk steps.

Soccer field, public school, test-in school, technical/ vocational school. “Helping improve the lives of others is the greatest achievement of all.” Kids with backpacks in Burger King parking lot.

McDonald’s parking lot and the R/20 bus stop. “Elmwood and Broad” the bus driver says. Those waiting tip their hats.“Take care now,” the bus riders say.

Pothole, pothole, “Verduras y Fruttas,” “Elmwood Convenience.” Social service one: Department of Health and Human Services. Two: Dorcus International Institute.

Three: Knight Memorial Library. Turn left before the park.

Hesitate from busy street to hidden drive. Cars stop, drivers wave. Avoid children circling bike as it interrupts their game of cops and robbers. Surrender wheels and keys.

The youngest holds the lock while the oldest does wheelies in the driveway. “Time for tutoring,” the bike rider says. Tutees hug a leg, an arm, a finger, coax off the backpack, and begin the great debate of Park versus Library.

Three and a half promises are made before the backpack hits the curb. Picture books and flash cards spill. Helmet off. Home.

SARA WINNICK B’15 is a BRYTE tutor.

FEBURARY 6 2015

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@ officialjaden

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EPHEMERA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GOODELL’S SIX FLAGS MISADVENTURE Believe it or not, Deflategate—or whatever contrived name you want to attach to public outrage at under-inflation of footballs by the recent Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots—has been the best thing to happen to the NFL in quite some time. This issue exists solely within the sport, meaning Commissioner Roger Goodell can pass judgment on it knowing full well that it is neither a crime nor catastrophe.

He can approach this issue as he sees fit—and without the extreme public pressure he has recently become accustomed to in the wake of the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson scandals.

Of course Goodell and the league have ridden this wave of good luck, taking two weeks and counting to maximize a spectacle over which they have complete control, as it speaks to the immorality and deviousness of a specific team and not the league itself. In the coverage of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the talking heads mentioned the circus around eleven sub-optimally swollen leather vessels a whole lot more than the actually damning issues of concussions and domestic violence— two problems that, this past year, have finally disrupted the league’s cozy protective sphere in causing widespread criticism and legal ramifications. Patriots Coach Bill Belichick and owner Robert Craft, basking in the euphoric haze of Championship glory, can expect a slap on the wrist from Commissioner Roger Goodell before he gladly hands them the millions of dollars generated by the Super Bowl.

The NFL, you see, is not interested in getting mixed up in matters that extend beyond the field of play. Such matters include Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)—a disease that results from repetitive head trauma and that 76 of 79 recently deceased football players tested positive for— and the scourge of domestic abuse currently tearing through the league. In spite of the fact that he runs the most popular sports institution in the States, and one that is a pillar of American culture, Goodell is a failed moral compass, unable to understand the gravity of the problems the league faces and largely unwilling to exchange profits for progress. +++ Elected by the 32 NFL owners to serve their interests, Goodell is chiefly engaged in minting money for his electors and himself. Indeed, the league has become a marketing dynamo, pulling in $7 billion last year from its TV deals with ESPN, CBS, Fox, and NBC and pushing total profits to $10.5 billion. Oh, and the league is a non-profit, so it hasn’t paid federal income tax for 50 years, while receiving 4.7 billion tax dollars since 1997 to build new stadiums.

Goodell, for his part, has cashed in big time, as his salary has risen from a paltry $11.6 million in 2011 to a stunning $44.2 million in 2014. (For reference, the highest paid player in 2014 was Aaron Rodgers at $22 million.)

Indeed, concussions and domestic violence threaten to distract Goodell from the job he signed up for—namely making the NFL the Disneyland of American sports leagues, an institution that offers needed escape from the grind of life with a heaping dose of family fun on the side. Every Sunday, across America, families gather in front of flat screen TVs to watch late-capitalism’s stream of advertising consciousness.

The latest Chevy Tahoe, Microsoft tablet, and images of massive men ramming their craniums together flit across LED displays while individuals lie back, recreating.

This is Goodell’s dream, a world where the NFL exists in its own bubble, unencumbered by that societal construction called reality. But, unfortunately, reality has arrived uninvited at the door of the NFL’s corporate monolith. +++ For a while now, the NFL has tried to model itself as an autonomous corporate and political entity that exists outside of the law. Goodell wants only the rules of football, those he both writes and enforces, to constitute the highest order while science, ethics, and law return to cozy domiciles within America. The league’s oligarchical governing structure puts the commissioner at the beck and call of the owners, and Goodell

occupies a strange political space where he must govern the league but not anger his electors. His salary depends on how he augments profits year-to-year, so it is in his best interest to do everything in his power to rake in the money.

This is where the issues of CTE and domestic violence rear their ugly, deformed heads. The NFL is largely popular because of the brutality of, what Goodell calls, its “on field product.” Americans pay big money to watch our gladiatorial pastime—the average Super Bowl ticket went for $3,715— and Goodell knows that reducing the violence of the sport is dangerous for the collective pocketbook. Goodell worked hard to undermine studies on brain damage, paying for an independent study that refuted earlier findings that playing in the NFL causes CTE, and later feigning ignorance that repeated head smashings could possibly cause trouble. In spite of this, Goodell has recently put in place new tackling guidelines that make it illegal to hit a “defenseless” receiver’s helmet after a catch, along with stricter concussion protocols that make the game “safer.” These changes to the rulebook come not from a place of concern, but from overwhelming public pressure.

Of course, the very same media outlets that pay billions to broadcast games also cover the league. So it should be no surprise that the ever-articulate Ron Jaworski claimed during a mid-October Monday Night Football broadcast on ESPN that the league has never been safer. Concussions are notoriously difficult to diagnose, as symptoms vary both in quality and duration. The NFL’s concussion testing is not at all foolproof, so it should not surprise you, dear reader, that the NFL reported a 13 percent decrease in concussions from 2013 to 2014.

What is evident is that the NFL controls the media spin on at least ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC, and of course its own NFL channel. If you govern media coverage, why not create a court system to streamline operations and create a fully enclosed institutional structure? The NFL has its own judiciary wing that independently handles domestic violence and other criminal cases, and also pays for scientific research on brain problems. As sports writer Jeb Lund recently put it, “the NFL’s inevitable trajectory [is] toward a vertically integrated entertainment-capital complex that also happens to include football.”

Goodell wants to make the NFL a landless political entity within which he can construct the league’s reality and act as overlord, answering only to the owners. That reality, if it were not for the irritating domestic violence arrests of 56 players since 2006, would include printing extra millions for the owners to add to their billions, maintaining those loyal corporate sponsorships, and continuing to let the game’s violence increase with the size and strength of the players.

While he has recently “cracked down” on Ray Rice and

by Sam Bresnick illustration by Ben Ross Adrian Peterson due to popular demand, those aforementioned 56 players were suspended for a total of 13 games between them. +++ Since Ray Rice knocked his fiancé out in an elevator, Roger Goodell has been pulled from his high horse into the muck.

This issue probably would have fallen into the void of public consciousness if not for the surfacing of the now notorious video, whose brutality captured the public’s attention. Nothing from his economics studies will help him now, as he tries to save the league’s image while also functioning as a moral arbiter on the issue of domestic violence.

He is clearly either inept, sinister, or both, and his admission that he was wrong about originally suspending Rice for two games came with the caveat that he was grabbing more power. He changed the league’s domestic abuse policy that formerly reviewed crimes on a case-by-case basis, so that a second infraction now garners an indefinite ban. In doing so, he positioned himself as the keeper of justice. Of course, the player can apply for re-instatement after a year, and Goodell is the only person who determines whether or not to allow reentry to the league. Josh Gordon, a receiver for the Cleveland Browns, just returned from an indefinite ban after a second positive test for marijuana. He was recently re-banned after testing positive for alcohol. So, in the twisted world of the NFL, which makes heaps of dough from beer sales, smoking and drinking are as light as domestic violence.

What was so interesting about Goodell’s response to the Rice scandal was his initial reluctance to act in opposition to domestic violence. Since the NFL has become a focal point in the national conversation on domestic abuse, Goodell has halfheartedly taken a stand. He instituted a feeble hourlong domestic violence training and education program that several anonymous players complained, “treat all [of us] as perpetrators.” What’s more, Goodell pledged $1 million to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, a figure that is unimpressive at first and gets less so when you realize the Center exists in all 50 states. Some quick math shows that each state received a mere $20,000, or .00045 percent of Goodell’s yearly salary.

Goodell’s program of increased punishment for domestic violence cases treats the symptoms of a much wider, more dangerous issue. It must be said that the league itself trivializes the importance of women. There are no female coaches anywhere in the NFL, and the incessant focus on hiring the most attractive cheerleaders further treats women as mere ornaments in a man’s sphere. Add to that the drunken machismo of many fans and the rampant violence on the field, and you have a culture that caters to the most abhorrent, animalistic aspects of American sporting culture. +++ But of course this is all way too serious for good old Roger.

That’s why he is thrilled to have the Super Bowl follow on the heels of Deflategate, an infraction solely in Goodell’s reality, a place where the public cannot throw its weight around in the same manner.

While Goodell and the NFL subject the public to the layered spectacle of the Super Bowl, with its prize-winning performers, outrageously priced seats, and $4.5 million thirtysecond ad spots, the commissioner and the league are saying that everything is fine. The marvel of not only the game itself, but also of the pervasiveness of entertainment and consumption, distracts the viewer from the insidious cultural and physical violence the NFL perpetrates. Instead of acknowledging any problems, Goodell is content to fade into the background in Phoenix, letting the commentators he indirectly pays shower him with praise for orchestrating such an event.

He prefers to exist in the shadows where he can construct the NFL’s alternate reality unhindered, all the while oiling the money machine to ensure it runs smoothly. Just don’t ask him to take a real stand about violence against women and brainsmushing pulverizings.

SAM BRESNICK B’15 prints extra millions to add to his billions.

FEBRUARY 6 2015

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BLACK GIRLS DON’T CRY

by Paige Morris illustration by Natalie Kassirer The following article contains mentions of self-harm, depression, and suicide.

I’m sitting in the living room, picking at the polish on my toes. My dad sits on my left, my mom on my right. The TV flashes soundlessly in front of us. It’s one of my first days home for the summer after my sophomore year at Brown. We make small talk. They’ve missed me. I’ve been well. But we’re still so quiet about the things that count.

It’s as though they can’t remember us sitting in this same position two years earlier—my mom, my dad, and me, in the volatile space between them—only then, the conversation wasn’t about grades or friends or college, but about my latest suicide attempt, yet another plea for help. We don’t talk about the times I couldn’t even look my parents in the eyes, and so settled on staring at my wrists. They were often such furious shades of red, loud and hurt in ways I wasn’t yet allowed to be.

Defining Depression When I was 17, I was diagnosed with concurrent major depressive disorder and dysthymic disorder—a mental illness cocktail sometimes termed “double depression.”

Major depressive disorder is characterized by episodes of depressed mood that impair everyday functioning. Episodes become diagnosable after they’ve lasted two weeks, and can be one-time occurrences or the first of many. Major depression makes conversations feel fatiguing, like performances I give dozens of times a day, no breaks.

Getting out of bed and facing a day of even minimal activity sometimes requires giving myself a mental lecture or rallying speech before I can imagine moving. Wanting to stop existing becomes as routine a thought as wondering what I’ll eat for lunch.

Dysthymic disorder is a chronic, ongoing state of depression. Some people are happy or at least okay until something makes them unhappy; I’m sad until something makes me less sad. Even when I’m not Depressed, I’m depressed.

Both disorders feel like self-hatred. Futility. Falling out of love with everything I usually can’t get enough of, leaving good books unfinished and delicious food untouched.

Depressive disorders have long been attached to stigma and skepticism in the United States. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) finds that Black Americans in particular have reported drastically fewer diagnoses of depressive disorders than other racial groups nationwide—4.2 percent, compared to 6.2 percent of whites and 7.2 percent of Hispanics. When we take into account all of the cases that go unreported for a variety of reasons—fear of stigmatization, largely—we can guess that this isn’t an accurate or even near-accurate reflection of how many individuals in Black communities actually experience these disorders, but a testament to the power of cultural stigma to keep Black sufferers silent.

A 2011 Center for Disease Control and Prevention report found that about three percent of adults in the US suffer from major depressive disorder, and about 10 percent suffer from at least one depressive disorder; these are some of the highest rates of depression in the world. Yet, even as overall diagnoses of depressive disorders increase, Black Americans remain relatively tight-lipped about mental illness in their communities. Sometimes these communities say outright that depression is a “white people problem.” In her book on depression in Black American communities, Black Pain, Terrie Williams quotes one Black sufferer as saying, “Depression is what white folks do … We [Black people] didn’t have time to be depressed.”

A popular perception of depressive disorders is that because common symptoms like insomnia, moodiness, and feelings of hopelessness are ostensibly matters of mindset, these disorders are outlooks that can be rectified at will. This view denies the significance of the biological aspects of depression. Certain hormone imbalances, such as higher rates of cortisol secretion and decreased serotonin production, have been shown to be reliable indicators of depression. These specific imbalances are often the result of sustained stress, which can occur in anyone. Hormonal factors can also work in tandem with hereditary predispositions and other genetic factors to set off this chemistry.

Another common perception of depression is that it can, apparently, be avoided all together, depending on one’s race—more specifically, it’s the idea that Black people don’t get depressed. The ‘white people problem’ approach to depression, which focuses on how race interacts with the experience of this illness, gets one thing right, though: depression can be (and often is) experienced differently across racial backgrounds. Chemistry shapes the way our brains interpret events and stimuli, but our cultural contexts can also shape how we think, and can often determine what the final outward expression of a depressive disorder looks like. The physiology of depressive disorders is the foundation upon which cognition and culture build; it’s the one commonality across all affected individuals. This means that although I have some biochemical aspects of depression in common with, say, a 65-year-old white man who also has a depressive disorder, we might express these chemical similarities in vastly different ways because of our cultural attitudes, influences, and—in the case of Black communities—restrictions on expressing certain emotions.

In other words, Black Americans do not have cultural permission to be depressed.

Imagine you’re one of the subjects, walking wide-eyed and oblivious into Ekman’s lab in either San Francisco or Tokyo. He sets you up in a chair in front of a screen. The lights dim, and a film starts. As time passes, the film gets progressively harder to watch. You see a man impaled by a piece of machinery, watch another lose his finger to a quick, serrated blade. These studies found that Americans watching the film reacted with facial expressions of horror and disgust, whether they watched alone or with someone else in the room. But the Japanese subjects, who reacted with the same sour looks as the Americans when watching the film alone, wore blank expressions while watching with an experimenter. Ekman’s research team chalked this up to the fact that preserving social harmony—which, in this case, meant maintaining emotional calm in the presence of others—is more crucial to collectivist cultures like Japan’s than it is to individualistic ones like the United States’s.

Ekman concluded that people across cultures are capable of experiencing and expressing emotions in similar ways, and respond with comparable facial gymnastics to strong stimuli like the graphic films he’d screened. But in some cultures, strict display rules exist that dictate when expressing emotions is appropriate, and when it would be better to keep your feelings to yourself.

I learned these lessons early on. When I cried as a child and there were no protruding bones, no missing skin or bloodstained clothes, my mother would tell me to “stop crying before she gave me something to cry about.” She would raise a hand and say, through clenched teeth, to “fix my face”—or she would fix it for me.

These sayings and others like them are featured in “Shit Black Moms Say” videos all over YouTube, in blog posts and round-ups on Black parenting at The Root, Slate, The Crunk Feminist Collective, and more. My experiences are not isolated incidents. So many Black children in the US grow up in a culture where sadness cannot exist.

The mostly white American subjects in Ekman’s experiment had no restraints on their emotions, no matter who was around. But for Black Americans, our display rules can mirror those of the Japanese subjects. We train ourselves to read as “neutral,” even when we’re in pain.

In order to understand this cultural stigma on sadness, it is important to consider the relentless history of violence and discrimination against Black communities in the US, the collective experiences that have shaped this culture into one known for its resilience and its suppression of weakness and vulnerability. Beginning in the era of Black slavery, continuing through to the Jim Crow era and into today’s age of police brutality and institutionalized discrimination, the notion of Black resilience was used as a tool of justification for our mistreatment at the hands of white communities—the idea that Black people are strong, and can endure more suffering than others. The same narrative was also used as a tool of faith-based strength building within Black communities—the idea that Black people are strong, and we can overcome anything. In order to sustain themselves in the face of these hardships, Black communities needed to project strength. Weakness from individual members could not be tolerated.

This mentality has persisted for centuries. We have bigger problems to face than mood swings and racing thoughts. As a survival tactic, perhaps resilience has served its purpose. But it remains a legacy we haven’t found a way to exist outside of, a legacy that allows stigma to thrive and Black people with depressive disorders to effectively disappear.

‘White People Problems’ Growing up, the word “depression” was worse than a slur in my house. In the eighth grade, when I first approached my parents about seeing a therapist—a concept I had read about on Internet forums—they turned me down on the grounds of what seeing a therapist would do to my ‘record.’

For a Black child, the ‘record’ can become a source of constant paranoia. The idea is that we start out with one ‘strike’ against us—our Blackness. If you’re born into poverty or the working class, add another strike. Any mistakes you make go into this record—the stolen candy from the drugstore becomes the reason you were shot down in cold blood. That time you smoked weed in your friend’s basement becomes the reason you deserved it. If young Black people do have a chance at survival or success in this country, openly having a mental illness can only be another strike on the record, a virtual guarantee that we don’t get to see that bright, fabled future.

Black communities’ framing of mental illnesses, particularly depressive disorders, as ‘white people problems’ reveals an understanding, however problematic, of the relationship between privilege and emotional expression. Through this rhetoric, the expression of sadness becomes synonymous with—and exclusive to—whites, who have not been denied the ability to express their emotions and receive empathy.

This is not to say that Black sufferers don’t express their sadness: they just do so in more covert ways. Across all racial groups, Black women have the highest rate of self-harm and are among the most vulnerable communities for the development and exacerbation of mental illnesses. The lack of awareness that self-harm has been and continues to be prevalent in Black communities stems directly from dominant cultural myths that sadness and self-destruction are luxuries only white, wealthy people have the time for—and the privilege of disclosing. As a result, members of Black communities are less likely to be diagnosed with depressive disorders and, even

Permission Denied To say that expressions of sadness are not “allowed” in many Black communities is to hint at the existence of certain cultural rules that govern such communities.

Psychologist Paul Ekman coined the term “display rules” to describe the appropriate sociocultural contexts in which people can express certain emotions. To study these display rules, Ekman ran a series of experiments on American and Japanese subjects in the 1970s.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

if they are diagnosed, are less likely to seek treatment or counseling.

An NIMH survey published in 2012 finds that 73 percent of whites diagnosed with a depressive disorder received treatment compared to 60 percent of Black Americans. These diagnostic disparities arise partially from issues of access and bias in health care. Many Black communities, especially in densely populated cities and ghettos, do not have access to affordable and convenient health care or insurance. And for every Black American who does seek treatment, several do not receive it—the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other research groups find that non-Black health care professionals constantly misdiagnose or under-diagnose Black patients. For instance, doctors will wrongly name Black patients paranoid schizophrenics in 86 percent of cases before they accurately name us depressed.

When looking at how social factors like race impact depressive disorders in ways that go beyond the symptoms, it becomes clearer why some cultures have restricted the expression of these disorders—why they refuse their children’s requests for help, and deny their children permission to be sad. I would never have been able to get a diagnosis or counseling had I not left my city and the Black community I was a part of there and been given access to Counseling and Psychological Services at a private university 200 miles away from home; no one should have to go to these lengths to find help.

And even now, I can count all the Black people I know on my campus who suffer from depressive disorders on just one hand. Because the public faces of depression have never been Black faces. We are still not allowed to fully own our sadness. +++ I’m nearing the end of my fall semester, junior year. My depression has peaked, and I’m having thoughts of dying. I tell this to my new counselor, who listens attentively.

Her office is furnished with the requisite long, plushy couch and a floor lamp that provides warm lighting. Animal trinkets line an in-the-background bookshelf. I focus on them, not her, as I tell her how being Black and depressed means keeping secrets from my family, and how none of my friends seem to notice, care, or believe that I’m suffering.

That must be hard for you, she says. Or maybe, that must hurt you a lot. Whatever it is, it’s such a simple remark that when I open my mouth to respond, I surprise myself with the tears that come to my eyes. I touch my face, to check that it really is wet. Nineteen years, and I’ve never allowed myself to cry in front of a stranger before.

My counselor reaches for the box of tissues on the end table beside the couch, and I wave my hands. “I’m fine.” I want to laugh—this is absurd, after all, this is against the rules—but now I’m really sobbing.

“You know, it’s okay to, if you want,” my counselor says. She plucks out a few tissues, hands them to me, and I’m almost convinced when she tells me, “It’s okay to cry.”

PAIGE MORRIS B’16 now nails the facial gymnastics.

FEBRUARY 6 2015

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CARTOONING'S DOUBLE FACE

Oppression and Liberation in the Cartoon World

by Athena Washburn illustration by Gabriel Matesanz

“Few things can hurt you more directly than a caricature of yourself, of a group you belong to, or—perhaps worst—of a person you deeply respect.” In October 2006, Kofi Annan spoke passionately about the power of images at the inauguration of a United Nations initiative named Cartooning for Peace: the Responsibility of Political Cartoonists, which called for an awareness of the real dangers of a “cartooning war.”

That same year, the UN banned the import of potentially nuclear materials to North Korea after evidence of nuclear activity; hundreds of thousands of people died post-invasion Iraq; Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel and Israel sent thousands of troops into Lebanon. Violence and war erupted all over the globe. Why then did Kofi Annan direct his attention towards a war of cartoons? Answers lie in the history of visual expressions of power in the media. +++ Cartooning has been at the cultural heart of Europe for centuries as a platform for political messages, both satirical and conservative.

In the 7th century, Pope Gregory I did something unprecedented: he declared the second of the Ten Commandments unreasonable. This Commandment clearly states, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

By declaring the depiction of religious figures acceptable, Pope Gregory gave illiterate members of society access to religious teachings, expanding the scope of the Church’s message.

Early Muslim leaders decided that representations of humans and animals ran the risk of becoming false idols and had no place in the religious community. Islam and Christianity both recognized the power of imagery, but each community responded to that power differently. +++ In today’s society, cartooning has preserved its power in political media, used as a tool for both questioning and upholding power structures. The impetus to form the UN group on Cartooning for Peace followed an incident dubbed the “Danish Cartoon War” involving a violent reaction—including both bloodshed and an Iranian exhibit of cartoons denying the Holocaust—to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, published in the right wing newspaper JyllandsPosten. In the aftermath, the Danish People’s Party coined the slogan, “Freedom of speech is Danish, censorship is not.”

The Danish Cartoon War bears striking similarities to the tragic events surrounding Charlie Hebdo. On December 7 Charlie Hebdo’s publication of an issue with a cover depicting the Prophet Mohammad provoked the murder of 12 cartoonists in their office in Paris and was followed by France-wide demonstrations, 4 million strong, of national solidarity.

People took to the streets in a rare show of unity, many carrying the slogan, “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie). The 12 deaths remain unquestionably tragic. Yet it is also imperative to look into the issues whose roots extend beyond the individuals involved. To try to understand the unfolding of events—the tension between France’s cherished conception of freedom of speech and the respect demanded for the absence of offensive religious imagery—it is necessary to understand some of the history of Muslims in France.

As was explained in Brown University’s recent teach-in, “France’s 9/11?,” many French Muslims (about 10 percent of the overall population) have ties to France’s colonies. Following the Algerian War in the 1960s, many Jews and Muslims immigrated to France. Since their arrival in France, the Muslim story of integration has been difficult. While the French government granted citizenship to the Jewish population, they denied the Muslim population the same right. With fewer opportunities in terms of living space, education, and jobs,

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the new Muslim population was given access to a very different France than that of “Francais de souche,” or the ‘native’ French. According to Maud Mandel, professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University, the antagonisms at play in present day France are in fact caused by the evolution of the Muslim identity as outsider which it took on during the recent surges of Muslim immigration into France.

With this history in mind, the decision to publish the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad looks less like an expression of freedom of speech and more like a reiteration of a long-standing power imbalance. Historian Kevin Boyle points out, “Freedom of opinion and expression is the child of freedom of religion in the sense that it was the struggle against religious absolutism by religious dissidents in Europe that opened the space for freedom of speech on political and social matters.” In the context of this and the growing Islamaphobia in France, is the question one of a threat to freedom of speech? Is this form of cartooning a continuation of Daumier’s legacy of artistic and moral work, or a contribution to the legacy of oppressing minorities through harmful images?

Maybe, moonlighting as “freedom of speech,” this mindset characterizes something else: nationalism and its extreme cousin, xenophobia. +++ Saba Mahmood, associate professor of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and author of the book Is Critique Secular?

Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, noted that “the issue [of the publication of Charlie Hebdo and the ensuing violence] is being framed as a standoff between religious taboos and freedom of expression, and of course we want to err on the side of freedom of expression. But neither is the issue.” The events, Mahmood implies, have deeper roots than the age-old euro-centric battle between dominant religious and political regimes and freedom of speech. These events draw from conflict rooted in a fundamental rejection of a part of the French population and with it a rejection of their voice and place in France. As “France’s 9/11?” panel speaker Ourida Moustafai pointed out, “Islam in the dominant French viewpoint is seen as a violent religion which is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and democracy. This is the discourse of those who claim that terrorism is the inevitable expression of a true Islam. Muslims, then, in this discourse, are seen as incapable of assimilating into French society and are repeatedly asked to reaffirm their allegiance to France’s republican values. The

paradox that French Muslims are placed under: they are asked to assimilate but also asked to speak as Muslims.”

The European (and, specifically, the French) definition of freedom of speech and expression differs from the American definition in that it includes a clause that allows the state to limit speech perceived as a threat to the public and political order. The specific French history of satire and cartooning as a tool to assert the power of truth in the face of a huge political machine (since Honoré Daumier’s depiction of King Philippe I as a ripe pear exploded in a six-month prison sentence and a huge public outcry) has for the most part safeguarded it from the second clause. This creates an atmosphere wherein cartoonists have the political right to publish nearly anything.

In some respects, the French cartoonists possess an incredible space in the media in which their voices may nearly always be heard. While a publication like Charlie Hebdo may pride itself on being “equal opportunist” in terms of offensiveness, in fact the voices of those it portrays do not hold equal space in the political and media sphere. There is an imbalance in power within the groups portrayed by the French media that must be acknowledged if freedom of speech is going to be discussed as a whole.

As Kofi Annan said in his UN address, “Cartoons… can both express and encourage intolerance, and also provoke it.

And the sad truth is that they often do all three. So, if we are going to ‘unlearn’ intolerance… we need to engage cartoonists in the discussion. Does that involve ‘self-censorship?’ In a sense, yes—but exercised, I would hope, in a spirit of genuine respect for other people’s feelings, not out of fear.

Does it involve ‘political correctness?’ Not, I hope, if that means being dull and pretentious. But again, yes, if it means remembering that other people have feelings. There is nothing admirable, or indeed funny, about heaping further humiliation and contempt on any group in society whose members are already feeling vulnerable and frightened.” Cartoonists are the unexpected kings of truth; their messages must draw from their realities wisely.

ATHENA WASHBURN B'18 thinks pictures speak louder than words.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE NEW OBVIOUS CHOICE

by Wilson Cusack illustration by Teri Minogue

Every June, 1500 interns arrive in Mountain View, California to begin their highly coveted summer internships at Google.

They represent approximately three percent of the more than 40,000 annual applicants (numbers from 2013).

Each year, international consulting and brand marketing firm Universum surveys 50,000 students about their top work choices after graduation. The survey is broken down by students’ field of study. In the 2014 results for students in the US, Google was the number one choice for business, computer science, and MBA students. It was second choice for students in the humanities, third choice for those in engineering, and sixth for those studying natural sciences. If you, too, were surprised that it was the top choice for MBA students, it turns out that this is nothing new—Google has topped that particular list since 2007, when it ended McKinsey & Co’s 11-year reign.

“MBAs choose Google over Goldman,” “It’s Google vs.

Goldman in the fight for best MBA students,” “The Great Career Debate: Google Versus Goldman”—articles litter the Internet making it clear that the two corporate giants are competing for the same talented graduates. How is it that what once seemed as the hub of millennial counterculture—the shorts and flip flops offering a comfortable replacement to the suit, the open floor plan supplanting the rows of cubicles—is now being mentioned in the same breath as age-old financial institutions? How is it that a company that once presented an alternative to The Mainstream is starting to resemble it? +++ First, though, how is this happening? How is Google able to top so many different students’ lists of where they want to work? The company regularly tops “Best Places to Work” articles, with glowing descriptions like (from CNN 2013) “The search engine giant attracts employees eager to work at the forefront of technology and innovation. In just the past year or so, Google has built a new Chromebook from the ground up and jazzed up Google Maps with features ranging from practical (local train schedules) to exotic (underwater panoramic photos).” (Call in the next 30 minutes and they’ll throw in a free set of steak knives!)

So is marketing their great secret? Google certainly does go to lengths to get in front of students, paying computer science departments at universities to come and give talks and attend career fairs, and handing out cards that say “Do cool things that matter”—a line that feels like something straight out of a meeting of 40-somethings brainstorming about what millennials want from an internship. But, for all that, the reasons students are going to Google might be much more familiar: a name.

Last year I was sitting in CS18, the second half of one of the intro CS courses at Brown, and I heard two students behind me talking. “I know where I want to work after gradu-

FEBURARY 6 2015

ating.” I could hear him turning to face the person sitting next to him. “Gooooogle,” the other said, whispering, as if it were sacred.

James (not his real name), a former Google softwareengineering intern chatted with the Independent about his experience there, and I told him that story. “I went in with that mentality too, I think,” he said. “Because you see some of these companies like Google and Facebook as the pinnacles.

These are the hardest internships to get and therefore, you know, the most people apply for these internships compared to other ones, and therefore they’re more competitive and therefore it’s better.” This sort of thinking is interesting because it’s oddly similar to how students make decisions when going into finance, a particular industry that Google is usually seen to juxtapose.

A piece published in Harvard Business Review April 2014 descriptively titled “The Real Reason New MBAs Want to Work for Goldman Sachs” reports on a study of how MBA graduates choose between competing high paying jobs. The study, conducted by a professor at Wharton, found that top students chose firms with better reputations and “the extent to which firm reputation would help with future employability” was the most important factor in making the decision.

Kevin Roose B’09.5, a writer for New York Magazine, wrote a book called Young Money in which he followed eight college grads in their first few years on Wall Street. In an interview with Vox, he explained a slightly different theory for how these decisions are made. He argued that security is sought above all. The reason, he argued, that Teach for America can compete with Goldman Sachs for the same people is because they both recruit early on and offer a plan. “The lesson of that is you don’t have to pay people a ton of money to come to your program after college if what you’re giving them still offers prestige and structure and the sense that they’re not signing up for something forever.”

But maybe I am being overly simplistic. There are a lot of things that might make Google an appealing employer beyond its competitive, secure, well-paying internships. We’ve all heard about these things: the free food, the Montessori education for the children of employees, the dance classes, etc. But all of these perks are apparently not enough to keep people around. High turnover is characteristic of the career steppingstone-type jobs, and at Google the turnover rate averages one year, according to a recent study from consultancy PayScale. +++ James told me about his experience at Google, first: how he was emailed, passed through two technical interviews, and then matched to a group at Google building an internal testing dashboard so engineers can see if their changes break anything in the existing site. “After the host matching I was

still very excited about this project, and I thought ‘There’s so many cool problems in this area and it’ll be very interesting to work on this team…But, in the end it was totally different from what I imagined…I was really bored to be completely honest, because I was basically just making the equivalent of a Ruby on Rails app…any high schooler could do that, a middle schooler could do that! Lots of kids in high school and middle school do essentially that stuff.”

James is not alone in this frustration. On the question and answer site Quora, someone asked, “What is the worst part about working at Google?” to which anonymous replied: “The worst part of working at Google, for many people, is that they’re overqualified for their job. Google has a very high hiring bar due to the strength of the brand name, the pay & perks, and the very positive work culture. As a result, they have their pick of bright candidates, even for the most low-level roles.” Quora is popular in Silicon Valley and that particular answer has 5,000 upvotes.

The lack of diversity in internship choice is particularly interesting for students studying computer science because there is so little trade-off. Startups and smaller companies offer competitive salaries and perks to match Google’s, which makes it seem like the monoculture in decision-making is maybe just for lack of originality.

I asked another former Google intern why he thought more students don’t go to smaller companies, and he made the case that the path to Google and the like is easily marked out.

Again, Google and the like pay the computer science departments at top tier universities to get access to the students.

They come to career fairs and give tech talks multiple times a year. If you want to work for Google, the steps to get there are clear and well trodden. The same can probably be said for companies like Goldman or McKinsey: the choice is right in front of you.

A 2012 Washington Post article, “Wall Street steps in when Ivy League fails,” cites that “35.9 percent of those who had jobs at graduation were headed into finance” and there seems to be this intrinsic lament in the fact alone. The ethics of working for these companies are beyond the scope of this piece, and it’s entirely possible to have a happy, ethical, and productive career at Google, McKinsey, Goldman, and all of the like.

The lament, rather, stems from the doubt that one third of Princeton’s incoming class would have identified banking as their true passion, and it’s a shame that some of the most talented young people in the United States are making these choices simply to be secure and find the next prestigious institution with which they can become affiliated. And Google is just the latest name to be added to the list.

WILSON CUSACK B’16 has never interned at Google… though not for lack of trying.

TECHNOLOGY

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FORECASTING PODCASTING

by Lisa Borst illustration by Brielle Curvey course of its first season’s three-month run, the show reached an average of 2.2 million listeners a week—even more than its parent program, This American Life, previously the most-listened-to podcast in the history of the medium. In the wake of Serial, NPR’s goal is obvious: to maintain the enormous interest in podcasts that Koenig’s show seems to have single-handedly unleashed. The actual mission of Invisibilia, it’s becoming clear, is to further bring to the mainstream a form that, for the better part of its existence, has been the near-exclusive terrain of a niche community of nerds. +++

On January 9, National Public Radio launched a new podcast called Invisibilia. The show, hosted by public radio mainstays Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel, almost immediately claimed the title of iTunes’ number one podcast, jostling past Serial for the top spot on what’s currently the only existing metric of podcast popularity. Invisibilia, according to NPR’s website, is about “the invisible forces that control human behavior—ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions…. Invisibilia interweaves narrative storytelling with scientific research that will ultimately make you see your own life differently.”

It’s an ambitious promise, and especially curious given that Invisibilia, at least based on its description, doesn’t really appear to fill any new niche within the podcast sphere. Existing programs, like Radiolab, 99% Invisible, and NPR’s radio partnership with TED, have been weaving engaging narratives with easily digestible pop science for years: it’s a familiar public radio trope that, while executed expertly and accessibly by Invisibilia, was by no means invented by the show’s two hosts.

Instead, what’s maybe most significant about Invisibilia is that it represents a fairly transparent attempt by NPR to sell an existing, time-tested set of products to a growing market of nascent podcast listeners. In every episode, in the interstices between popscience explanations of neurological phenomena and quantum mechanics, Miller and Spiegel offer relentless plugs for other NPR podcasts: “Before we let you go, I want you to imagine something,” says Miller at the end of Invisibilia’s first episode. “Imagine you could call up a friend and say, meet me at the bar and tell me what’s going on in the economy. And then imagine that that conversation is actually fun. Now stop imagining, and subscribe to the Planet Money podcast!”

These plugs seem to represent NPR’s full realization of the podcast’s potential and subsequent attempt to use the medium to sell itself. Invisibilia debuted only a few weeks after the final episode of Sarah Koenig’s explosively popular show Serial, which, it’s been widely acknowledged, was largely responsible for an unprecedented rise in podcast listenership nationwide. Over the

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ARTS

Google the phrase “golden age of the podcast,” and you’ll find a frenzy of articles and Tweets almost all dating from the past four months, and almost all falling into one of three categories: gushing praise of Serial, polemical backlash against gushing praise of Serial, and trend-forecasting sites predicting the dawn of a radical shift in modes of media consumption. The explosion in interest in the podcast medium since Serial’s October 2014 debut is remarkable, and coincides with a larger rise in interest in audio production as a whole. Audio storytelling is a growing professional field, especially among the nonprofit sector, and, as an increasing number of newspapers and magazines seek to embrace a multimedia ethos, audio content—often hosted on platforms like Soundcloud—is appearing with increasing frequency alongside videos and slideshows on many news sites. Just last week, Brown students Sophie McKibben B’16 and Liza Yeager B’17 launched a new platform, called Now Here This, for student-produced audio stories; several other independent audio platforms, like Gimlet Media and Public Radio Exchange’s Radiotopia, have launched nationwide in recent months.

In light of the podcast’s recent explosion in popularity, there’s been a lot of postulating—confined, naturally, to the insular sorts of white, educated communities to which public radio and podcasts have historically catered—about how we’ve arrived here, at the “golden age of the podcast”: how we’ve come to possess the technologies and leisure time to tune into podcasts, the unlikely attention spans to listen to hour-long stories with zero visual stimuli, and the landscape of values and tastes that privilege audio storytelling as a mode of knowledge production and circulation.

The fact is, podcasts have been around for a decade (the medium’s tenth anniversary was recently celebrated by Slate, with a series of articles, listicles, and awards published under the name “Ten Years in Your Ears”), and there’s no one easy reason that 2015 in particular should be “the year of the podcast,” as NPR’s vice president of programming, Eric Nuzum, proclaimed in an interview with the Washingtonian in late December. Indeed, the instinct to periodize a trend as it’s happening is usually pretty fraught, but it seems relevant to argue that a constellation of cultural and technological shifts have been building up to a point in time at which it’s not uncommon to overhear a conversation about Serial at Coffee Exchange, or to notice that the person next to you on an airplane is listening to Radiolab.

Technologically, of course, the podcast’s so-called golden age is just one result of a large-scale rise in the portability of the Internet. Newly Internet-enabled cars (50 percent of cars manufactured in 2015 will be Internet-enabled, and 100 percent by 2025) and smartphone technologies have allowed us to bypass the limitations of terrestrial radio and stream the latest episode of Serial in a nearunlimited number of places and spaces in the US. Smartphone interfaces themselves seem to be privileging and pushing the podcast, with the new “Podcast” app included as an undeletable addition to Apple’s iOS 8 operating system. Indeed, the extent to which the entire medium of the podcast seems to be in bed with Apple, in particular, is sort of sinister: despite a growing number of third-party podcast-streaming platforms like Stitcher and Overcast, by far the most popular platform for podcast distribution is the iTunes Store. Even the etymology of the word “podcast” itself—a portmanteau of “broadcast” and “iPod”—reveals an alliance between the corporation and the medium so long-standing that the technology to which it refers is now obsolete. +++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The podcast’s rise, though, is not simply a result of innovations to its apparatus. In its content, too, Invisibilia seems to have perfected many of the characteristics that have come to mark a successful podcast: engaging, memorable, and easily digestible tidbits of knowledge; linear, inspirational narratives reminiscent of a TED talk; and a variety of sampled perspectives and points of view. As conversations about podcasts have increased enormously in the past few months, some critics have argued that the elements that make a podcast like Invisibilia engaging and pleasurable do so because they echo the formal constraints of other, hyper-familiar modes of communication—namely, the ways we’ve come to interact online.

“Listen to enough podcasts and you may come to feel that they are not merely of the internet, but improved, microcosmic versions of it,” wrote Jonah Weiner in “The Voices: Toward a Critical Theory of Podcasting,” a 2014 article published by Slate.

Podcasts, he argued, “occupy a sophisticated position within what we might call the feel-good web—that sunny slice of the neighborhood where uplifting listicles and heartwarming tales of compassion form bulwarks against the cruelty and nastiness that overflow from YouTube comments and other online hellmouths.”

Indeed, in content and in form, the majority of today’s most popular podcasts bear some resemblance to the methods by which information is produced and presented online. Weiner points out that one characteristic of a good podcast is its refusal to rely on a single narrator. Whereas many of the earliest podcasts consisted of one or two amateurs authoritatively shooting the shit about a niche-interest topic from somebody’s basement, most of today’s most popular and engaging programs—99% Invisible, Love + Radio, Radiolab, The Moth—instead compile many different and distinct voices, collaging and juxtaposing them. Weiner argues that this emphasis on plurality functions in several ways to build trust in the listener. Obviously, when presented with more voices, perspectives, and personalities, we have more opportunities to empathize—to find a voice or a perspective familiar. Furthermore, though, crowd-sourced perspectives remind us of other Internet platforms with which we feel familiar and comfortable—comments sections, for example, or compilations of feedback on forums and Tumblr. We feel at home listening to multiple angles because they feel like a dialogue, offering the possibility that we, too, have the agency to engage and be heard; likewise, we derive pleasure from the Internet when we contribute to it, sending out our Tweets and comments as tangible displays of our own knowledge or kindness or senses of humor. If podcasts are indeed “improved, microcosmic versions” of the web, it’s because they continue to offer us that potential room for contribution, mimicking the structure of a one-on-one conversation but falling just short of something we can really take part in. This American Life’s website, though, has a prominent “submit” button.

+++ Weiner and others have argued that, ultimately, the particular pleasure of a podcast lies in the self-betterment it promises. Listening to a podcast is a low-commitment, high-payoff way to acquire both knowledge—largely the sorts of Malcolm Gladwell-ish fun facts and pop-science sound bites offered by Invisibilia, and Radiolab before it—and cultural capital. As the popularity of the form increases, so rise its artifacts’ positions as conversational reference points, and so rise the chances that you’ll be asked, in writing classes and at dinner parties, whether you’ve listened to this week’s episode of Serial yet.

The sense of self-improvement promised by the content of many nonfiction podcasts—the implication that, when you’ve finally caught up with every episode of This American Life, you’ll emerge a better, more cultured, more knowledgeable person—is bolstered by the promise of physical mobility afforded by the formal particularities of the medium. In his 1975 text “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” the film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry wrote of the “forced immobility of the cine-subject”—the degree to which the act of cinematic spectatorship renders a viewer passive, immobile, seated silently in a dark theater. “The cinematographic apparatus brings about a state of artificial regression,” he argued—and this enforced psychological regression is central to the paradoxical pleasure of consuming a

february 6 2015

film. On one hand: cinema entertains and comforts, situating you unaccountable and comfortable, with all of your needs met. On the other hand: cinema removes your agency, rendering you immobilized, powerless, infant-like.

Many critics have claimed that listening to Serial is as immersive and entertaining as watching an episode of Breaking Bad. As podcasts—with increasing funding, clout, and input from industry professionals—continue to grow in quality, then, perhaps the medium’s promise lies in its ability to negotiate that tension of spectative pleasure. The best podcasts of 2015 will be able to offer the same potential of entertainment, comfort, and self-bettering knowledge as any acclaimed TV show or movie—but at the same time, you can listen to a podcast while you drive to work, make a painting, cook dinner, learn to knit. Uniquely, podcasts allow for simultaneous consumption and production.

This multidimensional room for self-improvement—in terms of both knowledge acquisition and physical mobility—links many podcasts to what Weiner, in his Slate article, calls the “feel-good web.” At their roots, podcasts are educational: they’re information presented engagingly, digestibly, always with the underlying implication that attaining knowledge makes you a better person. The most popular podcasts are also, nearly always, uplifting to some extent. The first episode of Invisibilia, titled “The Secret History of Thoughts,” revolves around a man who one day finds himself unable to escape a deluge of violent thoughts and impulses: we hear him recount sudden urges to stab his wife, beat up strangers.

The episode, weaving in Psych 101-level explanations of various forms of psychotherapy, then traces his psychological healing process: he finds an effective form of therapy, he slowly gets better, he’s revealed to be a morally upright figure after all. Podcasts like Radiolab and the TED Radio Hour, too, often present vaguely teleological stories of scientists using technological innovations to enact positive social change. In “Toward a Critical Theory of Podcasting,” Weiner equates this storytelling mode to a more sophisticated version of sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed—those spaces on the internet that offer up positive, fuzzy content with high emotional payoff and little attentive investment. +++ It’s no coincidence that the podcast’s ‘golden age’ is descending concomitantly with an increasing fascination in an Internet unconfined to traditional screens. The pervasive rhetoric of the ‘Internet of Things’ (those everyday objects and appliances, like pill bottles, coffeemakers, and sweaters, that are connected to the web) reflects a growing desire to see the Internet everywhere, to access it not just on our phones and laptops but rather as something that’s fully dissolved into the environment; at its extreme, this interest in an increasingly screenless Internet has manifested as Google Glass.

A good podcast echoes the pleasures of the Internet far more robustly than a web-enabled coffeemaker, but, like an artifact of the Internet of Things, presents those pleasures without requiring its listener to stay glued to a screen. And just as the Internet increasingly spills out over the edges of the technologies to which it’s been historically confined, so are podcasts exceeding the boundaries of their traditional form. Serial’s narrative, initially self-contained, eventually came to depend on a growing discourse outside of the realm of the podcast itself: one whole episode pivoted around a detail emailed to Sarah Koenig by a listener who’d been tangentially involved in the murder case around which the show revolved; characters from the show, even weeks after it ended, have been stepping forward with statements and interviews in traditional print publications. As the podcast begins to break the boundaries of the iTunes Store and enter a larger and more pervasive cultural firmament, anchored in think-pieces and coffee shop discussions, one wonders whether the podcast is indeed an “improved, microcosmic version” of the web as we know it, or whether it’s pushing toward something else entirely.

LISA BORST B’17 is an undeletable addition to Apple’s iOS8 operating system.

ARTS

□ 14

TOM WANTS THE VIOLENCE OF THE CROWD IN HIMSELF

by Athena Washburn illustration by Gabriel Matesanz The press of bodies is immense; Tom’s ears are stuffed with noise and skin and Frederick swarms towards him. “YOU’RE HERE— COME ON, LET’S GO!” he yells, soft as a whisper within the cram of noise. “I CAN’T—” Tom yells back but Frederick does not hear.

His body tilts away and when Tom focuses his eyes he is watching streaks turn to two boys throwing slow punches towards each other.

A circle forms around them, Tom pushes forward, feels his head jerk back with each familiar hit, hears the new-formed crowd howl with each impact. Electricity runs through the press; Tom can feel his fingers like he never has before; Tom has forgotten about his legs and his thoughts and his family; Tom can feel every body in the room and they are all his; Tom feels his bodies against his, he sees beautiful sweat on the shoulder in front of his face. It moves with each stomp of the crowd’s timeless faceless feet the colors glitter Tom is mesmerized. He reaches out his finger and strokes the green he finds shimmering on the bronze skin in front of him, the man turns around, it is Frederick and he is dark and glazed-eyed. “COME ON” he says under the roar of the crowd. He grabs Tom’s wrist and pulls him to the center of the ring. Tom flies after him craving the wild pulse.

Frederick and Tom’s bodies collide, pushed by the crowd from all sides. “COME ON” Frederick says but Tom stands there, staring up at the ceiling feeling the blood stampede through his veins the room is electric the violence sublime he feels heat on his throat and his eyes are so warm. “HIT ME,” he says, and Tom is thrown back by the force of Frederick’s fist. He flies back hard into the wall of men.

A flash of suspension and Tom sees Frederick’s face teeth bared body there light black hair wet with sweat and heat eyes of beads—The crowd pushes back and Tom is grabbing Frederick he is pounding his head with his hands, he is kicking with his disconnected legs, he is crying and sweating and he hears Frederick laughing and swearing. The nerves of the mob are on fire Tom cannot see anyone anything anymore everything is shades of hot red he cannot hear everything is roaring he cannot speak so he spits instead and feels Frederick’s fist on his cheek.

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LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TOM SEES HIMSELF Tom opens his eyes. He is on the floor of the living room, he sees legs standing around. He sees Frederick across the room sprawled against the wall with a woman lying next to him. Tom’s ear is pounding and his eyes are heavy and dry. Tom watches a girl in a tight black dress tap something into her phone. She is wearing pink lipstick and Tom can see part way up her dress.

Tom feels the girl watching him, he feels his little man face flit to hers. He has gecko eyeballs, bald eyes that swivel in the night room. “I heard you were an angel,” he says and she stops tapping to look down at his sweaty head. He scrambles up to his knees. “I heard you were a machine,” he says too loud. He flies up to grab her arms and she backs away towards the kitchen where the bored girls mix drinks with their fathers’ liquors.

Green walls drip with boredom and angst, there is a pool of wanting forming under Tom’s left lung as his blood pounds under gently turning fans. “We never finish anything, we just start and start and start,” he says and his eyeball eyes start to droop down towards the ground. “Who knows, we could be alive” he murmurs and drops to the floor too drunk and beat to stand. The drink spills next to him. The pink lipped girl’s legs retreat farther into the apartment.

Tom has heard his voice before, it came to him in a dream last night and he heard it on the TV—He’s seen his rolled up sleeves and gravel head and slight hands inside of his thoughts before and in the faces of the girls who stare and in the sweat of the lovely violent men. Tom gets up again, slowly, and walks over to the old wood mirror by the big.

His face is big and warped in the reflection, his two eyes mirror themselves four times over. “Am I that I am that I am, I am that I am,” he murmurs to himself and touches a long thin finger to the cold glass. He stares at his mouth moving in ams, he stares at his crooked teeth, he stares at his tongue wetting his lips. He stares at his normal nose and his big weird eyes. They expand and expand, his pupils collapse and open again, they are huge, they are the sky and the roof and the butt of his cigarette! They are glass and noise and they are the mirror itself! They are all Tom can see and he wonders amazed at the blackness of black, he stares and he stares and they stare right back until he starts with a shock his forehead is cold his eyes have flown shut his head throbs into the cracked wood mirror and all the fancy girls with their drinks rush around him gasping for air while Frederick laughs from the floor.

FEBRUARY 6 2015

literary

□ 16

MUNDANE REASONS Emailing with Lydia Davis

by Mika Kligler illustration by Lee Bernstein ize some of the 19th-century inversions, etc., in the narration, and since the book would be aimed at children, maybe I should also change a harder word to something easier, like “melancholy” to “sad.” But I didn’t know just how easy to make it. I became very confused. It also made me more aware of how different “melancholy” is from “sad.” But I think the project turned out all right. Time will tell. I wanted the book to have a new life, not to disappear, and I think that has happened, in any case.

Lydia Davis lives in a converted schoolhouse in upstate New York. When I think of her, I think of her perched by a large window at an unfinished wooden table, bare of everything but a single sheet of lined paper, a carefully sharpened pencil, and a mug of Earl Grey or black coffee. She writes little stories: controlled, exacting, precise. Sometimes they are just one thought long; a story titled “Bloomington” reads: Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before. The folks at the MacArthur Foundation call her a genius. They say with confidence that we have never been here—in a curated, pared-down landscape of collected moments sticking out of the sand, so intimately familiar and so impassively bizarre—before. Davis’ narrators are dispassionate, matterof-fact, neurotic, their anxieties pressing, intimate, funny.

They remind me vaguely of my mother, in an early-morning menopausal insomnia kind of way. Davis has written one novel, eight short-story collections, one book of poetry, and many translations. Here, we email about dreams, and trains, and being sick of neuroses.

The College Hill Independent: Many of your stories—especially in your most recent collection, Can’t and Won’t—take place in trains and buses. What is it that draws you to these particular settings? Is it their insularity? The remove they provide from the landscape passing by through the window?

The possibilities that open up when one is confined in close quarters with complete strangers?

Lydia Davis: I like all your suggestions, and maybe all those factors play a part—I definitely like the insularity, the landscape passing, and the cast of strangers one is thrown in with. There are more mundane reasons that some of the stories are about travel, as well: I am forced to sit still for a while, I can read or write (I don’t carry a laptop or smart phone), or watch people. Thoughts come to me and I write them down. I am sitting still, but outside the window (in a train) something is happening—but not something very exciting, so I watch the landscape and then I’m returned to my own thoughts. A good situation for writing.

The Indy: I find your dream pieces in Can’t and Won’t compelling, and think that they fit in to a larger focus in your work on the logic in the absurd and the absurdity in the quotidian.

Often though, in real life, when someone wants to tell you about his or her dream, you want to run the other way. What was it about these dreams that inspired you to write or translate them into stories?

LD: I agree with you about this paradox, and I’ve thought a lot (of course) about how dreams work. For the dreamer, since logic is suspended during the dream, the dream is just the same—while it’s happening—as waking reality, so it has tremendous force. For the one who hears about the dream, it has none of that emotional force. My challenge to myself was not to recount every detail of a dream—unless, as was sometimes the case, it was a very brief one—but to extract from it what could be shaped into a tight, short, vivid story, or fragment. At the same time, I wanted to extract from a waking experience the part of the experience that was dreamlike, or could be narrated in language that made it sound like a dream. I was interested in the line between the waking and dreaming experiences.

The Indy: Your stories are difficult to categorize, and have been variously described as flash fiction, prose poetry, philosophy, etc. Much of what you do reminds me of the work of the

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INTERVIEWS

The Indy: In a conversation with Francine Prose, years ago, you spoke about rhythm in writing, and how important it is to you that writing is constructed beautifully. What do you think makes a piece of writing musical or beautifully constructed?

French Oulipo writers—Queneau, or Perec. How important are constraints to your work?

LD: I don’t impose constraints as part of my working process. The constraints may impose themselves, of course. In fact, they usually do—i.e. the material itself requires the story to be long (e.g. in the case of the one novel I’ve written, The End of the Story), or very very brief, or that there be hiccups interrupting words throughout.

The Indy: You’ve said before that although your narrators are distinct from you, you often write from your own life experiences. I wonder if this goes both ways—do you, in real life, ever draw from your narrators, or feel their voices bleeding into your own? Do you ever see, for instance, your real life letters devolving (or evolving) into pieces like The Letter to the Foundation or Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer?

LD: I was going to say, No, never, to your question until I read the end of it. I don’t generally feel those narrators insinuating themselves into me in my normal daily life, but it is true that I may start a piece of writing that is not intended to be more than a practical letter, and find that one of those narrative voices has taken control, and the practical letter is no longer that, but another story.

The Indy: You recently rewrote Bob, Son of Battle (which is a children’s book from 1898), translating it into modern English. How does English to English translation differ from French or Dutch to English translation?

LD: It was actually much harder—to my surprise. I had tried English to English once before, translating the beginning of Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey into modern English. I found that very difficult, because I was normalizing the stylistic eccentricities and thus losing some of the interest. In this case, I had intended simply to translate the dialect in the book—there is a lot of it—into standard English, which also loses something, of course. But then I felt I ought to modern-

LD: I don’t think a piece of writing has to be “beautifully” constructed, but rather strong, secure, balanced, or, if you want it to be unbalanced, lame, then it should be that—it depends on the piece of writing. Some of mine trail off at the end, for instance, which is usually deliberate. Somehow, you have to keep a sense of the whole piece in your head as you write or after you have written it—is it weak in the middle, in the end? I hear the text in my head as I write. I don’t read it aloud, because I don’t need to. But I have met people who don’t hear what they read. I think they must be missing a lot, in that case.

The Indy: You’ve spoken, at various times, about Sebald, Beckett, and Kafka as three writers you have studied closely or admire. Is there an element of writing that spans the work of these three writers (or others, if you’d like)—a common denominator that specifically inspires you?

LD: Good question, and I’d have to think a little to see if they do have something in common. I’m not sure they do, except that they are innovative, and excellent, each in his own way. Beckett and Kafka do both have a sense of humor, though we don’t think of them as primarily humorous writers, of course. I don’t think the same is true of Sebald. Beckett plays with language self-consciously, which I don’t think the other two do. They all have strong, individual visions, however. They are not American, but European, and maybe that touch of the exotic also draws me to them.

The Indy: Many of your stories are filled with neuroses, anxious and obsessive narrators. In some ways, the shortness of some of your pieces would seem to be antithetical to the kind of cyclical constancy of these neuroses. How do you think brevity and obsession fit together in your work?

LD: You’ve saved the hardest question for last. Let me see... The anxious and obsessive narrators don’t have to be present in each story. For example, in the little story about the cornmeal and its condensation, or the little one about the ladybug making a decision. The obsessive or neurotic narrator is fully present, I think, in “The Letter to the Foundation,” which is very long, goes on and on, as she thinks things through for herself and returns to her thoughts to modify them. There is room for all kinds of stories, depending on the material, and often, certainly, the material doesn’t need to include that neurotic narrator. I’m a little tired of her, so maybe we won’t see so much more of her in future...

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This Week in Independents “The drugs that are far more deadly than cannabis” is, at press time, the most readstory at The Independent [UK].

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Artist Talk: Alan Sondheim

Core Workout with Daniel Shea 9AM - 10 AM // AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $5

7PM - 9PM // Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02906 // Free

Yhwh, a God of the Wilderness: A Biblical and Extrabiblical Investigation 5:30 PM - 7 PM // Brown/RISD Hillel, 80 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02906 // Free

World Expert Olive Oil Taster Johnny Madge 6PM - 7 PM // Local 121, 121 Washington Street, Providence, RI 02903 // $15

Villanova Wildcats vs. Providence College Friars

8 PM // Dunkin Donuts Center, 1 La Salle Square, Providence, RI 02903 // $13 and up

No Time To Waste 10:30 AM - 2 PM // Providence Childrens Museum, 100 South Street, Providence RI 02903 // Free with admission

Futurebirds, Smith & Weeden

9PM // The Met, 1005 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI/$10

Accomplished Classical Guitarist Diego Campagna

3PM - 4:30 PM // Redwood Library and Athenaeum, 50 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI 02840 // $10

Frost Biter’s Bash

6:30 PM to 11:30 PM // Hall of Boats, Herreshoff Marine Museum, 1 Burnside Street, Bristol, RI 02809 // $85 (plebian rate) or $250 (VIP rate)

Afro-Paradise: Performance, Race, Violence and the Black Body in Times of Terror 12PM - 1:30 PM // George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space, Churchill House, 155 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02906 // Free and open to the public

Opening Party, Providence Children’s Film Festival

5:30 PM - 9 PM // RISD Museum Metcalf Auditorium 20 North Main St., Providence, RI 02903 // $15 for adults, $10 for children and students