The College Hill Independent V.30 N.5

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 05 | MAR 6 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 5

NEWS 02 Week in Review

maya sorabjee & tristan rodman

03 Look at the Big Picture dash elhague

METRO

05 ‘To Ban’ Tobin jane argodale

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 Jade Donaldson MVPs Layla Ehsan and Pierie Korostoff

SPORTS 06 Wrecking Crew william underwood

SCIENCE 12 The Kiss of the Angel jamie packs

EPHEMERA

09 Watching the Watchers 11 Thirsty Boys ;) erin schwartz

ARTS 07 Skate-boring!

eli neuman-hammond

15

Fat Tats, Hip Cats the people

FEATURES 13

Doctors w/out Blinders

16

Hips Don’t Lie

jennifer tsai

ben ross

LIT 17 Happy Together kyle giddon

X 18 Squeeky Clean

FROM THE EDITOR S The Indy wants to be your friend. Quickly, double-check your email, fold your laundry, and update a few items on your Linkedin profile because from here on out, the Indy’s going to take you out and let you know it’s okay. Open up the color spread in an empty bathtub and lay into it for a warm hug, letting the water slowly fill and flip you upwards, Indy-branded candle and book close at hand. Isn’t it so nice to come home to flower petals strewn across your mattress on the floor?

Love may not guarantee a future, but the Indy does (ask us about print media). I even heard that copies of the Indy have been converted into small sailboats, sending lover’s messages across the oceans, Southern New England’s largest weekly slowly filling out into the corners of the globe, its news arriving like dial-up internet, the harmonized promise of a better tomorrow.

Lately, it feels like all your friends are trying really hard to fall in love and it even seems to be working. You keep entering their living rooms to find copies of the Indy strewn all over the place, leading trails to the bedroom and that’s how you know. Maybe you’re not so sure what to make of all this yet.

Nowadays it often feels overwhelming to even sit in your room. You’re spending a lot of time talking to people on the phone, pacing back and forth and laying your head on piles of accumulated library books.

But take a minute to walk down the street, nod at someone passing and maybe tear off a piece of the rolled Indy secretly held close-to-heart under your jacket, handing it to them—a business card, a poem of your crisis. –PM

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

anne fosburg

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ROADS No Beef Let me paint you a quick portrait of modern India. In my neighborhood there’s a housing colony that has taken it upon itself to evict residents and businesses that aren’t vegetarian.

We call them the eggshell mafia because they look for evidence in the trash in order to find their next victim.

At the local McDonald’s, one of the highest-grossing items on the menu is called the McAloo Tikki: a potato sandwich. In deference to the country’s huge Hindu and Muslim populations, the fast-food giant wiped its menu clean of beef and pork, the iconic Big Mac subbed for a desi variant—the Chicken Maharaja. Burger King, which opened in India in November, sells a mutton Whopper.

On the messy roads of Calcutta or Kochi, there’s an indigenous and unmissable urban archetype: the metropolitan cow. After being deemed too old to be useful on the farm and too holy in Hinduism to be sent for slaughter, Indian farmers often let go of their financial burdens quite literally, letting them wander into the cities from the rural hinterlands. The cows come to the city in search of a dream, finding instead only traffic accidents. I once saw a particularly sad urban cow on Bangalore’s appropriately named Food Street, sticking its head into garbage cans and eating discarded plates.

Then there are the more privileged counterparts, the cows that are tied to bus stands as living idols—and for a few rupees, you can buy a bundle of hay to feed them and be blessed on your way to work. You lucky thing!

For the more carnivorous and less religiously-inclined desis, bulls were still fair game. In fact, India is currently the second largest exporter of beef in the world, with beef sales even going up sixteen percent in the last year, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vocal condemnation of the socalled ‘Pink Revolution.’ But this statistic will soon change: on March 2, the state government of Maharashtra passed an act that flat out bans bull slaughter (protection of cows, on the other hand, has been written into the constitution). Now, selling beef—or even just being in possession of it—can land you in jail for five years with an INR 10,000 ($160) fine. The lowly water buffalo is currently the only bovine left for legal husbandry.

India is one of the largest secular countries in the world.

And to celebrate this fact, the Prime Minister’s office created a new holiday, Good Governance Day—and decided it would be on December 25. Censor boards are bleeping the word “Bombay” out of songs for its anti-nationalist linguistic agenda. Ramadan this year will be a sad, beefless affair. And finally, with this latest development, bovines officially have more rights than homosexuals, and it’s safer to wander the streets as a blissfully ignorant urban cow than as a woman.

Confused? Me too. –MS

Dude, Where’s My NASCAR? In Grand Theft Auto, if you’re really devious, you can steal a police car. The cops will chase you, sure, but you can drive it around, turn on the sirens, and watch other drivers pull to the shoulder in your wake. With most cars, you can get the fuzz off your tail by heading into an auto shop, getting a new paint job, and changing the plates. But not police cars. Drive one into Los Santos Customs and they’ll promptly turn you away. “Cop vehicles cannot be modified,” flashes the heads-up display. It’s a worthwhile lesson: there are some things you shouldn’t steal—not because they’re not valuable, but because their origins are so obvious they’re incriminating.

Last Friday, NASCAR driver Travis Kvapil woke to find his Sprint Cup car missing. Kvapil and his team were staying at a Drury Inn & Suites in Morrow, Georgia, where they’d left the No. 44 Team Xtreme car in the parking lot. The car was nested inside a large, unmarked white trailer hitched to a black Ford F-350. Surveillance footage shows a figure dressed in black entering the cab of the pickup truck at 5:32 am, and driving the whole rig away. Team Xtreme was scheduled to leave for the racetrack at 5:45.

For the racing team, needless to say, this was a huge setback. Sprint Cup cars are expensive—nearly $250,000—and it’s very hard to win a race in the Sprint Cup series without a car. It’s also not like you can run to the NASCAR dealership, stroll around the showroom, and pick up a new one. The team had to withdraw from their race Saturday at the Atlanta Motor Speedway—they had no proverbial horse.

Detective Sergeant Larry Oglesby, the top sleuth in Morrow, didn’t even think that the thieves were after the car.

He told the local CBS affiliate that people usually assume unmarked white vans are filled with “lawn equipment or something,” calling it a “crime of opportunity.” On Saturday afternoon, the No. 44 car was found on the side of a road in Snellville, Georgia—20 miles away—unaccompanied by the truck and trailer. Local police found damage on both the driver-side door and the ignition switch. Sounds like it was time to ditch the car and bail anyway. Where were they gonna get it repaired? –TR

by Maya Sorabjee & Tristan Rodman

MARCH 6 2015

NEWS

□ 02

FINDING TERROR A Narrative Week in Review

In 2013, Slate published a piece entitled “You Won’t Finish This Article.” Using a web analytics software called Chartbeat, Slate discovered that by the third sentence of a typical online Slate articles, 38 percent of readers were gone. The average reader made it halfway.

Slate isn’t the only publication having this problem. The American Press Institute reported this May that 59% of adult Americans don’t dive deeper into a particular subject than the headlines. In 2008, the Nielsen Norman Group, which does large-scale studies of user experience for businesses, found that Americans read 20 percent of the average web page.

So what does this mean for our understanding of particular news topics? We are a nation of skimmers and, as such, our understanding is often cursory—or at least, based on what can be gleaned from the first sentence or paragraph of an article. This makes it especially difficult to nail down how Americans are developing their understandings of particular topics. Some years ago, Americans read most news stories from their local paper. Tracking down how we were informed (or ill-informed) could be done with relative ease. But today, we read an amalgamation of headlines and early-appearing sentences from a variety of news pieces. Our understanding of news topics isn’t crafted by particular authors or particular news sources, but by piecing together segments of the news stories we’ve elected to read. In essence, the news story narrative that Americans know is a sort of metanarrative that they form on their own.

What do we mean by narrative? In his book The Poetics of Prose, the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov hypothesizes that narrative is composed of two episodes: “those which describe a state… and those which describe the passage from one state to the other.” Based on this, one definition of narrative is any series of events with logical consequence. From this it follows that there must also be a temporal dimension to our definition as well: the sequence of events must give some sense of the passage of time.

The American reader spends time with various bits and pieces of articles rather than the full narratives of the articles themselves. So the question we need to ask is: what narratives are they forming as they read the news?

What I’ve constructed below attempts to answer that question. It’s a representation of the metanarrative Americans might have read on the subject of terrorism the week beginning February 22, as if all the bits and pieces of information about terrorism that week were part of one giant article. Since research suggests that Americans rarely read deep into news pieces, it is constructed entirely from first sentences of articles.

Here’s how I formed this metanarrative: I began by running a Google News Search with the word “terror,” restricting results to articles that ran the week of February 22 in American publications. With Google News Search, this also ended up searching for articles that contain the words “terrorist” or “terrorism.” This search returned about 500 results. I then took the first 50 of these results, which had been sorted by “relevance” according to Google News. I took the first sentences from these 50 articles and compiled them into a list. Then, I went about trying to form a narrative from these first sentences.

In the process of forming the narrative, I allowed myself three operations. (1) I could organize the sentences into paragraphs as I saw fit and put them in any order I thought formed a narrative. (2) I could cut any sentence, generally to prevent redundancy or irrelevance (for example a piece on a band called Terror). I cut 15. Anything else that didn’t fit the narrative had to be placed in a field below labeled “outliers.” (3) I could add section headers in bold to try and give readers a firmer sense of the narrative I was trying to form. Every sentence in the metanarrative below is a sentence that actually appeared in an American publication.

One might argue that the first two operations give me too much editing power; can’t a narrative be formed from any random set of 50 sentences, if I’m allowed to pick and order them to my liking? With a significant quantity of cuts or outliers, it would certainly seem I had formed a dishonest representation of the narrative. But I’d argue that, in any 50 sentences that center around a particular topic, there’s actually very few narrative interpretations that make sense.

Narrative arcs are inherent to certain sets of events. Imagine if I told you: “the cat climbed the fence; the cat saw the bird over the fence; the cat ate the bird; the cat was looking for food.”

Isn’t there a clear narrative to be formed here, even though there are 120 ways to order this sequence of events? Similarly, while my narrative interpretation may not be the only one, it’s probably one of the few options that fits, and certainly seems like it’s one that is present in the minds of many American newsreaders.

03

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NEWS

by Dash Elhauge illustration by Casey Friedman

The Metanarrative A Calm, Mystic Day A mysterious, well-built underground tunnel found along a Toronto university campus near a venue to be used during this summer’s Pan Am games has authorities on high alert for a possible terror threat.1 The Pentagon let slip that one of its training camps to help fight Islamic State terrorists is in Jordan—information the pro-US kingdom had specifically requested be kept private, and the latest gaffe in a series of sensitive leaks coming out of the Department of Defense.2 Darkness Looms The terror groups are getting more ruthless, their attacks more brazen.3 Today al-Qaeda-type movements rule a vast area in northern and western Iraq, and eastern and northern Syria, several hundred times larger than any territory ever controlled by Osama bin Laden.4 The latest disturbing video from ISIS shows what the Islamist group touts as the next generation of jihadist killers, pint-sized terror trainees who appear to be as young as 5 participating in drills and reciting verses from the Koran.5 It’s no small thing that a US court has confirmed that two groups often lauded as “moderates.”6 The Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization were found liable on Monday by a jury in Manhattan for their role in knowingly supporting six terrorist attacks in Israel between 2002 and 2004 in which Americans were killed and injured.7 The head of Homeland Security is urging shoppers to be vigilant after al-Shabaab, a terror group tied to alQaeda, named Mall of America among potential targets for attacks.8 After a siege at a Kenyan mall two years ago, the FBI started staging mock attacks in US shopping centers during off hours to test their readiness, an official said.9 With a workplace shooting this week at an armed security company in New Jersey and a terrorist threat against Minnesota’s Mall of America, shootings and terror attacks are becoming a real threat in the United States.10 Al Shabaab Strikes Terror Heavily armed police and security forces were deployed at shopping malls in Paris and throughout London after a video by a terror group in Somalia threatened attacks.11 A video released by Somali militant group al Shabaab this weekend threatening terror attacks against shopping malls in the West boosted claims by the Obama administration that a possible government shutdown this week could leave the United States vulnerable to such attacks.12 Law enforcement authorities in the San Diego area sought Monday to assure the public that they were taking all possible security steps in the aftermath of a Somalia-based terror group’s threat to do violence at malls in the United States and other Western countries.13 All malls in America are increasing security measures after a terror group called for attacks similar to the one in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2013.14 Video surfaced Saturday purportedly posted by the Somali terror group al-Shabaab, calling for attacks on the Mall of America and other places.15 A terror group with ties to al-Qaeda released an online video Saturday appearing to call for attacks on Western malls, including at least one US shopping center.16 At shopping malls across South Florida security was visible, but typical, two days after a Somali terror group issued a call for attacks on shopping malls in the US, Canada and Britain.17 The terror group that carried out the deadly attack at a shopping mall in Kenya is calling for a similar attack on a western mall, specifically mentioning the Mall of America, among others.18 The Rogue Valley mall has addressed the recent terror threat on US malls by the terror group Al Shabaab, responsible for the 2013 attack at a high-end shopping mall in Kenya.19 Are our malls secure?20

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

American Bravery New threats made by terrorists to attack malls, including in the United States, have not stopped people from going to local malls.21 As she sat at a table outside the Starbucks in the Jersey Gardens mall today, Karen Robinson said her background gives her a unique attitude toward terrorism.22 As a mother and grandmother, I am concerned about the current direction our use of power in securing my family’s safety is taking us, and the world at large.23 There have been no threats specifically targeting the Westfield Old Orchard mall, but Skokie police say they are aware of the video that calls for attacks at shopping malls in the US, Canada and United Kingdom.24 Threats made by a terror group won’t stop Garden State shoppers from heading to the malls.25 Residents of Bergen County say they aren’t scared of threats against Western malls made this past weekend.26 The Crackdown–America Won’t Back Down New anti-terror laws will see 100 million cellphone users in Pakistan forced to submit their fingerprints to a national database or get cut off from the network.27 French authorities on Monday seized the passports of six people suspected of trying to join Islamist groups fighting in Syria and Iraq, the first such confiscation under a measure adopted in November as part of a new, stricter, counterterrorism law.28 Judgment Day A federal jury in New York has found the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority liable for a series of terrorist attacks that killed or wounded Americans in Israel during the early 2000s, officials announced Monday.29 A federal judge on Monday sentenced two Inland Empire men to 25 years in prison for plotting to travel to Afghanistan, join al Qaeda and commit a violent jihad against American military and government targets overseas.30 Two Californian men were sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison for conspiring to support terrorists and kill Americans overseas, federal prosecutors said.31 A British man accused of plotting a terrorist attack has gone on trial for a second time under unusually secret conditions.32 The Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization were found liable on Monday by a jury in Manhattan for their role in knowingly supporting six terrorist attacks in Israel, between 2002 and 2004, in which Americans were killed and injured.33 +++ Terrorism is a complex issue—there are terrorist cells all around the world that antagonize the United States. Some have allegiances with particular regions or religions; others have none.

Some of them operate within our borders. Their motivations aren’t always clear-cut enough that we can categorically declare them evil. So then why does a metanarrative with an extremely clear moral binary emerge? One explanation might be that the media purposefully tries to satisfy our desire for a hero-epic narrative by running stories that fall within this familiar structure so they’ll be more memorable to readers. For example, perhaps the piece that opened with “As a mother and grandmother, I am concerned about the current direction our use of power in securing my family’s safety is taking us, and the world at large,” was meant to engage the American desire to see the “American Bravery” section of the narrative I’ve outlined filled.

Maybe understanding that Americans now interpret the news through metanarrative, combined with their desire for the hero-epic narrative, is the best way to find out why the news landscape surrounding terrorism looks the way it does.

Finally, let’s take a look at the outliers to the metanarrative, those few sentences which didn’t fit into the metanarrative formed above: Egypt is now on the front lines of the battle against ISIS, and some of its leaders are making new accusations about the Obama administration’s war on terror.34 Somali groups and leaders in Minnesota are uniting to condemn the recent al-Shabab video, which calls for an attack on the Mall of America—while also battling prejudices that may unfairly paint local Muslims as a threat.35

MARCH 6 2015

These are the stories that slip, that don’t fit in the narrative of being an American in the War on Terror this week. Egypt, despite being on the front lines, doesn’t like the way the US is handling terrorism. Muslim communities in Minnesota are distancing themselves from the Somali extremists. But neither of these stories fit within our tight, hero-epic narrative. They cast a shadow of moral doubt that makes the narrative too messy to read. It’s not that Americans are even necessarily unwilling to accept these ideas because they’re alien; it’s that, given the framing hero-epic narrative the news is presented in on a week-to-week basis, these facts aren’t essential.

These ideas aren’t being dismissed; they’re just not being engaged, the same way we ignore the paragraph-long description of a petunia in the midst of a gripping mystery novel.

This serves as some explanation for why many Muslims in this country have such a difficult time distancing themselves from terrorists. It just doesn’t fit into the weekly narrative of the American reader. If the news narrative of terrorism was centered around conflict between Muslim communities in America and American views of Muslims, they’d at least have a place as one of the key members of a conflict—but the way the American discourse on terrorism seems to be organized, this is impossible. If we want to change the conversation surrounding terrorism, we have to start recognizing that.

DASH ELHAUGE B’17 loved it; went to the SciLi; read the Indy.

Citations for sentences (article title, source) 1. Mysterious tunnel found built near Pan Am games venue in Toronto sparks terror fears, New York Daily News 2. Jordan furious over Pentagon leak on secret anti-terror training camp, The Washington Times 3. Brazen, brutal: 5 terror groups making headlines this month, CNN 4. ISIS is proof of the failed “war on terror”, Quartz 5. Terror trainees: New ISIS video shows indoctrination of kids as young as 5, Fox News 6. Torts and terror, New York Post 7. Palestinian groups are found liable at Manhattan Terror Trial, The New York Times 8. Homeland Security chief: Be ‘vigilant’ at malls, USA Today 9. US staged mock mall attacks to test readiness after Kenya siege, official says, CNN 10. What to do in the event of a terror attack, CBN News 11. Malls in Paris, London raise security after terror threat, Bloomberg News 12. Warning of US vulnerability to terror attacks during DHS shutdown might be ‘playing politics’, Vice News 13. FBI, police monitor local malls amid terror threats, Fox 5 San Diego 14. Malls on high alert after terror threats, ABC 57 News 15. MOA named as possible target in alleged terror video, MPR News 16. Terror video encourages attack on mall chain with Chicago-area locations, CBS Chicago 17. South Florida malls mellow amid terror “threat”, CBS Miami 18. Terror group threatens mall of America, others, in new video, CBS Minnesota 19. Rogue Valley Mall addresses Al-Shabaab terror threat, Kobi 5 NBC 20. Somerset residents: We’re not too scared by terror threats to malls, NJ.com 21. Mall terror threat fails to deter local shoppers, WKBN 22. Jersey Garden shoppers undeterred by terror threats against US malls 23. Our failed war on terror, Baltimore Sun 24. Local mall-goers respond to Al-Shabaab terror threats, WGN 25. NJ shoppers undeterred by terror threats to malls, NJ.com 26. Bergen County residents not deterred by terror group’s mall threats, NJ.com 27. Pakistan anti-terror laws force 100M cellphone users to be fingerprinted, NBC 28. Anti-terror measure gets first test as France confiscates passports of six would-be jihadis, Vice News 29. New York finds Palestinian groups liable for terror attacks, LA Times 30. Inland Empire terror suspects sentenced to 25 years in prison, San Bernardino Country Sun 31. 2 Californians get 25 years in Federal Prison for terror try, Associated Press 32. Retrial begins of UK man accused of plotting terror attack, ABC 33. Palestinian groups are found liable at Manhattan Terror Trial, The New York Times 34. Egypt: US playing ‘double game’ in war on terror, CBN 35. Minnesota Somalis unite to denounce Mall of America terror threat, BringMeTheNews. com

NEWS

□ 04

WITHOUT A DOUBT In the United States, Catholic women will have abortions at about the same rate as other women—one in three by age 45—according to a 2014 study published by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice organization that conducts research on abortion and contraception. They also use contraception at the same rate as other women. In January 2012, President Obama declined to overturn the Health and Human Services mandate that required private health insurance to cover contraception. In response, Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence called the mandate “an unprecedented, outrageous and unacceptable attack on religious freedom and the moral life and ministry of the Church,” in an article penned in the Rhode Island Catholic, the diocesan newspaper. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, Rhode Island is 54 percent Catholic, which makes it the most Catholic state in the United States, and makes Tobin an important leader for many in Rhode Island.

Bishop Tobin has been the Bishop of Providence since 2005, and currently sits on the Boards of Trustees of Providence College and Salve Regina University. His column in the Rhode Island Catholic, “Without a Doubt,” has been published in two different books. The power he wields in Rhode Island extends beyond his clerical duties and into the work the Diocese does to influence abortion access: running Crisis Pregnancy Centers that discourage pregnant women from having abortions, supporting anti-choice candidates, speaking directly to elected officials, politically organizing Catholics through the Rhode Island Catholic Conference, and working with the Rhode Island Right To Life Committee. This work has been effective: though 93 percent of Rhode Islanders support a woman’s right to choose, the legislature is overwhelmingly anti-choice, according to Planned Parenthood of Southern New England.

As a result, Rhode Island has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the region, getting a D+ rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, a group that lobbies elected officials and organizes pro-choice voters, in contrast to the As and Bs of most nearby states. NARAL’s ratings include factors such as the number of abortion providers, the restrictions placed on abortion, and availability of emergency contraception. In 1997, Rhode Island placed a broad ban on abortions after the first trimester that was declared unconstitutional in 2001 by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. The ban has not been repealed, though there is a permanent injunction against its enforcement. State health insurance also cannot legally cover abortions.

Barth Bracy, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Right to Life Committee, often introduces bills to the House and speaks on behalf of the anti-choice wing of Rhode Island’s legislature, which is often itself tight-lipped.

Nicholas Mattiello and M. Teresa Paiva-Weed, both Democrats, Catholics, and endorsed by Right to Life, serve as Speaker of the House and Senate President, respectively. In 2011, Paiva-Weed commented on her insertion of antiabortion language in a health exchange bill, “My faith is part of who I am. My faith was not the defining factor, but it certainly was a factor.”

And it can indeed be difficult to get an abortion in Rhode Island. Chantal Tape, who worked as a pregnancy options and pre-abortion counselor at an abortion provider in RI from 2010 to 2012 and is now planning a career in

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metro

Choice and the Church in Rhode Island

by Jane Argodale illustration by Pierie Korostoff

abortion care, wrote that “Rhode Island’s laws are more restrictive than those of other states in New England and I’ve definitely witnessed the effects of that working in a clinic here,” in an email to the Independent. “The biggest obstacle for most women is cost. The fact that state health insurance doesn’t cover abortion is something that absolutely should be changed in order to improve abortion access for low-income women. Denying abortion coverage through Medicaid doesn’t stop abortions from happening. It just places an undue burden on the people who are already struggling the most.” The cost of abortions is around $300 to $600 in the first trimester, and $600 to $1000 in the second. Another issue is the accessibility of abortion clinics in Rhode Island, all of which are located in Providence. Age is another issue. “Connecticut, for example, doesn’t require parental consent for people under 18 who are seeking abortion,” Tape added, while Rhode Island does.

Tape, who has counseled women struggling to decide whether or not to have an abortion because of their religious beliefs, says “I like to tell people that, whatever they believe in, whether it’s a god or some other higher power, that that entity knows them, knows their personal struggles, their reasons for making whatever choice they make, and knows that they’re a good person who is doing what they need to do for their health and wellbeing.” Tape encourages these women to seek out pro-choice faith-based organizations as resources, such as Catholics for Choice and Faith Aloud.

Rhode Island’s Catholic population consists of the descendants of earlier rounds of immigration and more recently settled immigrants mostly from Latin America.

Despite the diversity of the Catholic community, the Rhode Island Catholic seems largely preoccupied with the “sin of abortion” and preserving the sanctity of marriage. This preoccupation with abortion remains unyielding even as a large segment of the religion’s following has moved towards greater sexual liberalism, acceptance of a diversity of sexual orientations and expressions, and use of contraception and abortion. Sixty-one percent of Catholics in America disagree with the Church’s teaching on contraception according to a survey published in USA Today. There clearly exists a tension between establishment Catholicism and many current followers.

That same tension is why a few weeks ago Pope Francis told Catholics they need not breed “like rabbits,” and that having an unmanageably large family was “irresponsible,” but then more recently called people who choose not to have children “selfish.” There’s an unwillingness to alienate more liberal followers by fully condemning them, but also an unwillingness to fully accept their existence as well.

Thus the voices we hear from the Catholic Church’s leaders tend to slant more conservative. That’s why it’s unsurprising that a mostly Catholic state would have such restrictive abortion laws.

When Bishop Tobin spoke to the Independent, he acknowledged the “diversity of opinion” on abortion among Catholics, but said that pro-choice Catholics “must continue to learn and study and pray over the issue. They have a lot of work to do. You can’t be a faithful Catholic and pro-abortion.” Though he acknowledged the “prominent voice” the Church has on the issue, Tobin asserted that the work the Church is doing to restrict abortion is not directly

related to Catholic beliefs. “We don’t talk about the sacraments in politics. We talk about the common good, and abortion is a matter of the common good and natural law, which includes the right to live. Thou shall not kill applies to all.” He added, “we generally oppose abortion in all situations, but in some cases where the mother’s life is also threatened, there is some discretion in Catholic doctrine.”

It's unclear how his ideas of discretion could be made law without explicitly deriving legislation from Church doctrine.

When asked about potentially high rates of illegal abortions, Bishop Tobin said he had “no idea what that rate would be, but it’s the role of society to support pregnant women.” The rate of abortion across countries is about the same whether it’s legal or illegal, but with a much higher chance of complications from illegal procedures. According to Planned Parenthood, in the decade before Roe v. Wade, abortions made up 17 percent of pregnancy-related deaths, while now only 0.3 percent of women who get abortions have serious complications afterward. But even though abortion is legal in the United States, according to Chantal Tape “the restrictions that are in place now are already prompting women to seek alternatives such as self-induced abortion, which can be extremely dangerous and can have serious legal ramifications.”

In conversation with the Independent, Bishop Tobin emphasized the need for both the government and nonprofits to financially, medically, and materially assist women who become pregnant in situations of poverty, single parenting, substance dependency, and abuse. Though he acknowledged the difficult situations that might lead women to choose abortion, he added that abortion is harmful “psychologically and spiritually” to the woman.

“With abortion there are two victims, and we very much care about both.”

Chantal Tape disagrees. “In my experience, the only thing that ‘damages’ women is living in a society where they’re constantly told, by people who have no interest in or compassion for their lives or their experience, that they should feel guilty for making the best choice that they can for themselves or for their families.” Among the emotions women may feel after an abortion, Tape listed “anger, sadness, relief, empowerment,” and noted that few women she encountered in her work coped poorly after an abortion.

Tape added that abortion and contraception access are matters of gender equality. “In order to have even the smallest semblance of equality for women, we have to be able to control our fertility.”

In the country’s most Catholic state, Bishop Tobin has quiet, but significant power. Citing the Church’s work with the Rhode Island Right to Life Committee, who campaign for legislation that restricts abortion and endorse antichoice candidates, Bishop Tobin acknowledged that “we have a presence in the state house.”

Chantal Tape agrees that the Church’s efforts are “a threat to abortion access in Rhode Island. I think, living in New England, we’re somewhat sheltered because we don’t see quite the same level of abortion restriction here as in other parts of the country.” However, “the reality really is that abortion is basically inaccessible to many women in this state.”

JANE ARGODALE B'18 was declared unconstituional.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WHY NOT FOOTBALL?

An Afternoon with the Connecticut Wreckers

by William Underwood

For Connecticut Wreckers owner and head coach Gary Peloso, women’s tackle football was never a likely landing place.

“My wife saw an advertisement for a women’s football team in the paper,” he recalled. “I had no idea. Women’s football?”

Though Peloso has spent much of his life around football, including years of coaching at the high school level, it’s not surprising that he knew nothing about the Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL), the organization in which the Danbury based Wreckers participate as a member franchise. While professional men’s football dwarfs other sports in audience and revenue in the United States, women’s football claims a very small place in the American sports consciousness. Even the local press seems to be unaware of the Wreckers—a Google search yields three articles on the team, most dating back to 2013. “We’re based in Danbury and nobody in Danbury knows about it,” Coach Peloso noted.

Yet the sport boasts two major leagues—the Women’s Football Alliance (WFA) and the IWFL—which combined maintain more than 75 franchises sorted into regional divisions and distinguished by their respective size and stability.

Some franchises, like the Pittsburgh Passion, carry more than 50 women on their rosters and attract average crowds of as many as 4,000; other teams carry as few as 13 and host much smaller fan bases at home games. There is frequent shuffling within both leagues, as franchises fold or shift location based on the willingness of owners to finance teams. Wreckers quarterback and general manager Kate Stepp, who has played for three franchises in Connecticut over the past five years, is one of many Wreckers who has jumped from other rosters to play in Danbury.

The Wreckers joined the IWFL in 2012 after Coach Peloso and a group of players stayed together in the wake of the Northeastern Nitro’s 2011 collapse. A member of the IWFL’s North Atlantic region, the team travels as far as Baltimore and Montreal to play during the regular season, and even farther in the playoffs. Individual players often play offense, defense, and special teams, meaning that many spend entire games on the field without stop. This would be a chore in any sport, but in a game as physically demanding as football that level of exertion is almost unimaginable. When I asked Jessica LaSane— an offensive and defensive linewoman for the Wreckers who was sidelined due to a minor knee injury during the February 23 practice I visited—about this, she just laughed off the difficulty: “Yeah, but it’s more playing time for us.”

Players vary widely in age, ranging from 20 to 45 years, but almost universally the women on the Wreckers grew up playing football in their neighborhoods with family and friends. For many, like Laura Anderson—an offensive and defensive linewoman, punter, and kicker who played lacrosse, soccer, and swam in college—IWFL football is a natural pivot from other high level athletics. Much like college athletics, too, women are not paid to play for the Wreckers. In spite of the significant amount of time involved, the rigorous workout schedule, and the long commutes to games, playing football is a labor of love. Indeed, Wreckers players, who referred to themselves throughout our conversations as a family, contribute their personal funds to help pay for equipment, rent facilities, and organize travel. Alongside team fundraisers and sponsorship packages, these dues help the individually operated franchise finance itself with money that otherwise would not be available.

Like most people, I had very little conception of full contact women’s football before I visited the team’s practice last Monday night. I’d seen stories about the Lingerie League

—a spectacle in which teams with names like the San Diego Seduction and the Los Angeles Temptation dress in helmets, shoulder pads, and their underwear for almost exclusively male crowds and pay-per-view audiences—but never knew that two regularly functioning international leagues existed in which women wear full pads and play 11-on-11 NCAA rules football.

As a result, my expectations of what I’d find at the Wreckers practice were largely colored by my own narrow conception of football as a distinctly male sport and my exposure to other instances of women playing in male-dominated athletic fields. Think of Mo’ne Davis, whose rapid ascent to national prominence as a star pitcher in the Little League World Series was cast by Sports Illustrated and countless other news outlets as the story of an exceptional girl breaking through gender-based assumptions in a traditionally male sport; or Mo Isom, a soccer star in the Southeastern Conference who nearly made the Louisiana State University football team as a kicker in 2012, and whose decision to try out was cast as a publicity stunt by outlets like Fox Sports, which emphasized “Homecoming Queen is no Ordinary Walk-On.” I was prepared to hear personal narratives from Wreckers players that would frame their football team as an act of resistance to a sporting landscape that minimizes women’s athletics and almost completely denies them access to sports like football or baseball.

It’s tempting to view the Connecticut Wreckers and their players with a similar interpretative lens. Along with the lack of funding and media attention given to women’s football, there are no clear developmental tracks that funnel women into full-tackle football, and players are often stigmatized for their participation in the sport. Stepp recounted for me her early experience in football, including people’s reaction to her new hobby: “After any game the women are totally bruised. A new level of soreness,” she explained up front. Having never played a contact sport like football, she began to show up to work with bruises along her arms. She quickly learned to wear sleeves so as to avoid fielding the types of questions that accompanied her participation. “I’m proud to play, and I love playing, but it’s definitely not what’s expected. Not everybody thinks women should be playing tackle football.”

Stories like Kate’s emphasize the significance of women’s full contact football and its ability to challenge pervasive assumptions about women’s athletics and women as athletes, yet for the women who play for the Wreckers these types of questions are secondary. Christie Koukopoulos, a slot wide receiver and cornerback in the Wes Welker mold whose three kids love coming to games and who, though injured, was running drills in sweats and a helmet, provided perspective when she ran over from a drill to talk to me during practice.

Behind her, half of the team was busy running the Oklahoma drill, a famous exercise in which players line up one-on-one between two rows of pads, one carrying the ball, with simple objectives: tackle if you are a defender; break the tackle if you have the ball. The drill has fallen out of favor at all levels of football because of its excessive violence, high risk of injury, and lack of application to in-game settings, but there’s no debating its allure. No drill offers glory like the Oklahoma drill.

As players collided behind her, I asked Christie, called “Pops” by her younger teammates, if she ever faces resistance when she tells others that she plays full contact football.

At the same moment, an impressive whack echoed from the other side of the field, where one woman had just hit and pinned another to the ground. The team whooped and cheered around her. “No,” she replied nonchalantly.

It was around this point in my conversations with the Wreckers that I realized the only person in the building surprised by the existence of the IWFL was me. More tellingly, I was the only person referring to the sport as women’s football, a distinction that was at once patronizing and descriptively unhelpful given that the only game-related difference between the IWFL’s product and that of the NCAA is a slight variation in football size. In my eagerness to cast the team in a conversation about empowerment and athletic equality—a well-intentioned inclination that is unfortunately often the default orientation for female sports coverage—I had almost blinkered myself to the women themselves, their skill as players, and their personal motivations for playing football.

As more women found time to come over to the sideline, I continued to press the idea of resistance that informed my initial interest in the team, with little success, and even less enthusiasm. Players consistently answered questions about how they began playing football with replies like, “I was looking for something to do,” or simply, “it seemed like fun”— not the indignant, stereotype-defying narratives I had been looking for. For women with lifelong athletic pedigrees, trying football is hardly a major leap. Most women hadn’t had the opportunity to play football in high school or college, but the IWFL offers an obvious athletic outlet with more structure and rigor than recreational leagues in other sports. The one comment that fit with the narrative I had expected to hear was Coach Peloso’s remark that playing for the Wreckers gives women on the team “the ability to prove they’re athletes.” Of course, the idea that they should need to prove that, or that football in particular is the vehicle through which to do so, trivializes the impressive athletic careers that most players on the Wreckers can already claim, and so is at odds with the attitudes of the women I spoke to. “For a lot of us, we’ve played volleyball, soccer, softball, rugby,” Anderson pointed out.

“Why not football?”

The Connecticut Wreckers finished last year’s season 4-4, and begin this year’s schedule on the road, April 18, against the Maine Rebels. Their first home game is May 2 in Danbury against the Montreal Blitz.

WILLIAM UNDERWOOD B’15 played a year of high school football, then quit.

MARCH 6 2015

SPORTS

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FANCIFUL SKATEBOARDING IN FANCY TIMES

by Eli Neuman-Hammond illustration by Devyn Park

“We use chaos as a gateway to the unknown creating a new path. Nothing that can be measured by skill or talent, that of which we have very little of. Our path is forged by passion and ingenuity.

In a world full of sportsmen, here stand a few real dudes; has-beens and never was nobodies, modern day skate jesters ready to withstand humility and simultaneously glory. Fulfilling our position in the universe. The clever opposition to the standard of mass appeal. A truly creative skateboarding company that everyone can relate to…one for the skate nerd inside us all.”

So reads the mission statement of Fancy Lad Skateboards, a Boston-based skateboarding company whose recently released video “Fancy Lad 3” has shaken neither the skate world nor the art world. Started by Nick “Big” Murray and Colin Fiske (of PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life fame), the Lads have been living in Matt Roman’s far-from-fancy mansion wreaking havoc for the past three odd years, existing on the fringe of skateboarding culture, which is itself situated on the fringe of the day-job-going, family-minded, Good Samaritan ideal that so dominates the American imagination. Skateboarding is still less than a generation old, but much has happened during the evolution of the skateboard from a simple toy, used by children and land-locked surfers to a multifaceted tool used by ‘skaters’ of all sorts, in all corners of the globe.

Multiple declines and renaissances have already left their mark on skateboarding’s history; massive corporations like Nike, McDonald’s, Pepsi Co., and Adidas have nudged there way into the skate industry, concomitantly strengthening, threatening, and ultimately transforming the skateboarding community; the Internet, especially platforms like YouTube and Instagram, have revolutionized the way skateboarding is shared and performed. Today, in part because skateboarding is such a young activity, its history exists all at once: (most) of the pioneers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s are still alive and shredding, right beside the contemporary generation of skateboard-

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ing legends and laypeople. The Lads occupy a unique position in this ahistorical skateboarding community, one of the few positions that radically challenges the culture of technical progress and competition that has dominated much of skateboarding over the past decade or so. Whilst firmly rooted in skateboarding history and current norms of skating, the Lads also question these norms and point towards an uncompromising return to the playfulness and freedom from which skateboarding was born, a return which resolves the climax and expiry of technical skating. +++ (Street) skateboarding is often viewed as an enacted critique of authority, namely the authority of capitalist ideology and the regulative, intrusive state, which together produce oft-oppressive cultural norms. Skateboarders move in, on, under, and around the structures in which these norms are writ physical. While skaters often skate despite its illegality, and not because of it, there is an untheorized critique tacit in the very act of skateboarding.

Even though the average skater is not thinking politically when he or (less commonly) she does a kickflip down a set of stairs—he or she is likely simply performing a physical activity that grants them a feeling of pleasure—we can read critical power into the skater’s action. Staircases, for instance, are structures that facilitate efficiency, in that they make for quicker movements from one place to another; organization, in that they suggest a route for people moving from place to place; and safety, in that there are handrails to assist their users and that they are often erected over uneven surfaces. Skateboarders invert all of these values by turning the stairs into a stage for superfluous activity, with no end other than itself; inefficiency, in that they do not move simply from point A to point B; and danger, because they risk injury with every trick they perform down the stairs. The act of skateboard-

ing challenges all of the intended functions of the stairs, which, in spite of their seeming inconsequentiality, subtly influence and affirm particular values.

Of course, not all skateboarding takes place in the streets. Skate parks, for example, have rules of their own. They too can be seen as sites of education, perhaps even as slyer, subtler educational apparatuses because they front an illusion of critical activity while actually training and conditioning the skaters who use them to limit themselves to certain spaces and practices. Also, many skate parks are privately owned, for-profit enterprises, so the act of skateboarding in a park doubles as an economic transaction.

Over the past decade or so, a type of pacified, apolitical skateboarding has permeated the skate world; figures like Shane O’Neil and Shawn Malto—good guys, with a lot of publicity and big sponsors, skating with a clean, tech style— have stolen the spotlight from the party-hard, rebel image of a skateboarder, which developed through the 70s and 80s and thrived on a creative brand of destruction. But the wave of tech skating that has dominated much of skateboarding for the past decade has near reached its limits, and now faces a sort of existential crisis. The difference between David Gonzales grinding down a 25 set or 30 set no longer matters, and the insanity of Nyjah Huston’s parts flattens out into a sort of mind-numbing blur where every trick feels the same. We’ve reached the quantitative end of the road. 720 flips, dolphin flips, nollie tre bluntslides, massive rails, and other feats of technical mastery feel bloated and played out. They are, above all, un-relatable, and therefore not entertaining or engaging. It’s time for a return to style. +++ Videos like “Fancy Lad 3” herald such a return.

The video reads as a synthesis of the playful, allusionary, Internet-art elements of NY-based crew and company Bronze and the joyfully

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

free, creative skate-philosophy of Mark Gonzales, especially as realized in parts like his Video Days. The video blends clips from trash films (especially horror and sci-fi), Microsoft Paintesque illustrations and aphorisms (“paradox aesthetic,” “unconventional arousal technique,” “fancy lad, the reason god created america,” “the video practically watches itself,” “I am a slave to my practice”), conventional skateboard tricks, numerous bails and sketchy tricks, and many unconventional permutations of skateboarding.

The actual skateboarding in “Fancy Lad 3” is an (il)logical extension of the recent resurrection of “easy” tricks in skater’s vocabularies: wallrides and wallies are in; powerslides are cool again; impossibles are no longer a mere relic of Koston and Daewon’s youth; finally, it’s acceptable to do a varial flip on camera. To quote John Lucero, the famed inventor of the slappy and owner of Black Label Skateboards, “[skateboarding is] taking it back, I’d say one step back and two steps forward.

We’ve been doing the same thing for so long, let’s do something different.” Fancy Lad takes this dictum and runs with it, de-educating skateboarding so as to breath into it new life.

By challenging the norms of an activity defined by challenging norms, Fancy Lad facilitates a return to traditional skate ethos in an activity that’s substantially different from its early incarnation. The Lads replicate skateboarding’s relationship to the world within the skateboarding world. As skateboarders take handrails and turn them into elements for rapid, risky motions, the Fancy Lads take tropes of skateboard films and use them to redefine and redirect a culture facing some dead-ends.

For example, it’s common practice to structure a skateboard video by individual “parts”; each skateboarder gets a two to five minute segment in which they showcase different tricks at particular spots. “Fancy Lad 3” is organized according to parts, but there are some parts by people who don’t even skateboard in a conventional sense. Mike Linquists’s entire part consists of shots of him lying down on a skateboard, rolling down hills, stairs, and other surfaces. The inclusion of these parts in a skateboarding video shows that skateboarding-proper has a limited perspective on what is and is not skateboarding; in fact, Linquists’ antics are very much a part of the activity of skateboarding, just as much as an Andrew Reynolds frontside flip or a local Providence kid, shredding the RISD ledges. Skateboarding reaches as far out as those who identify as skateboarders allow it to; the only requisites are wheels, wood, a world, and a human being in motion.

A moment passes in “Fancy Lad 3” when its significance crystallizes in an all-of-a-sudden and obvious kind of way: as a skater locks into a smooth, long crooks, he arrests your attention; it’s actually a good trick, certainly one of the few in the video. It’s a kind of disarming and surprising moment, and just as it washes over you, the shot cuts to something else, before seeing him pop out of the crooks. For a second you wonder if he lands the trick or not, before realizing that it doesn’t matter—that’s the magic of it. The clip recalls Ali Boulala’s ender in Flip’s “Sorry,” where he attempts and fails to ollie a massive 25-stair set. The convention, of course, is to end a video

MARCH 6 2015

part with a “banger”—a trick that blows the audience away. Boulala instead offers us the antibanger, a non-trick that still blows us away, and also is totally relatable and entertaining. There’s no respect or attention lost in Boulala’s apparent failure; likewise in Fancy Lad 3. The Fancy Lads decondition that expectation of something good, of getting a “trick,” or accomplishing something for external validation, and revive a sheer enjoyment in skateboarding. +++ The absence of a traditional, commercialized engagement with their audience might be to blame for the lack of attention the Lads have garnered from within and without the skate world. They do sell merchandise, but such enterprise is firmly secondary to their spiritual mission. Likewise, the audience is present in the Fancy Lads’ work, they create with intent to share, but it’s more of an open relationship, where readers are invited to participate, but by no means necessary for the creative acts to take place. On 16 pages of their blog, there are only seven comments. Thirty-five of their 46 videos on YouTube have less than 2,000 views. Moreover, the Lads show no sign of stopping their prolific output. The Fancy Lads lack an audience, and clearly do not give a fuck.

But perhaps a more apt description of the

Lads’ attitudes would be “giving not a fuck.”

There is something positive in the Fancy Lad philosophy, something that “gives,” but gives nothing at all. They’re synthesizers, not reactionaries, taking elements of skateboarding, brand language, airs of political significance, and strange filmic productions and creating something that’s simply worth creating. Elements like movie clips, resituated in a Fancy Lad context, make one wonder how on earth human beings decide to rally the money, motivation, and organization to make such crap. This very feeling of wonder is extremely redemptive and affirmative, turning the trashiest, kitschiest little creations into sources of joy, and rendering the Fancy Lad’s own creations honest, worthy pieces of art, which are accessible to “the skate nerd inside us all,” and not just skate nerds.

ELI NEUMAN-HAMMOND B’18 is fucking ready for the snow to melt.

arts

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L00KING IN Transparent Surveillance in Providence

by Erin Prinz-Schwartz illustration by Blaine Harvey I’ve taken this bus line hundreds of times; once a week to work, half an hour each way, and short trips to the grocery store and to class. I’ve catalogued its tiny details: the illustration of a surprisingly shapely figure on the “Do Not Lean on Doors” sign, the week where the video screens were broken and ads for a Brown University smoking study transformed into glitch art.

I remember that the driver of the 4pm bus likes to stop in the middle of Ives Street, get out and go into the corner store, then come back two minutes later with a snack only to find a line of cars honking behind him. I know the RIPTA policy on bike racks, fares, and where you should sit when you have a lot of grocery bags. But I can’t remember consciously noticing the blue sign by the front door, “Security Cameras in Operation/Cámeras de Seguaridad en Operación” until about a week ago, when I knew to look for it.

That RIPTA buses are under surveillance isn’t surprising: video surveillance has been an “industry best practice” for public transit for a long time. But, following the reopening of Kennedy Plaza this January, the question of to what extent riders were being recorded has become a source of public concern. Renovations to the bus hub—proposed by the RIPTA Comprehensive Operational Analysis (COA) and pushed through by Mayor Angel Taveras before he left office—shut down the plaza from July 2014 to January 2015. RIPTA came under criticism for the multi-million dollar plan as the homeless who spent time in KP were displaced, the information office and bathrooms were closed, and passengers had to run between far-flung stops during some of the hottest and coldest months of the year. Many of the temporary stops were clustered on a traffic island close to Burnside Park, where the waiting crowd looked stranded between flows of traffic and the grassy terrain became increasingly dusty and uneven as the summer wore on. It didn’t help that the redesign played into a discourse that the city was simultaneously gentrifying downtown while neglecting parts of its infrastructure useful to the poor. So when Kennedy Plaza reopened on January 17, months behind schedule, a lot of bus riders were ready to hate it.

But the new Kennedy Plaza has its benefits. The elimination of the middle bus lanes makes passing between stops less dangerous, as riders no longer need to weave through traffic to make their connections. The bus shelters are larger, and the screens displaying the next bus’s arrival time eliminate some of the uncertainty endemic to public transportation use in Providence.

Along with these visible improvements are surveillance cameras, mounted on lightposts in groups of four at intervals throughout the plaza. They are not meant to be inconspicuous.

On RIPTA’s website, a press release about the renovation catalogues Kennedy Plaza’s exciting new amenities, like bike lanes, ticket vending machines, real-time information, and a farmers’ market in the summer. Under the “safety and security” heading, there’s only an allusion to “upgrades to RIPTA’s security system for the safety of our employees and passengers.” That the improved amenities are described so specifically throws into focus the vagueness of the language

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describing recent changes to surveillance. There were clearly updates made to RIPTA’s video security system as part of the renovation, but how extensive were they? What changed, and don’t we have a right to know about it?

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island certainly thought so. On February 2, after being alerted that RIPTA refused to release its surveillance policy, the ACLU released a statement expressing concern about the lack of transparency and calling for the policy’s publication. By state law, the policy needs to be made available, and areas under video surveillance need to be identified by signage. RIPTA had done neither of these things at the time of the statement. In response to the statement, the surveillance policy was made public on their website and RIPTA issued a press release clarifying how the footage could be used. According to the statement, the recordings are kept for “approximately” 30 days and are protected by encryption and a password. The only two people who can view the recordings are RIPTA CEO Raymond Studley and RIPTA Chief of Security James Pereira. In the press release, Studley is quoted saying that “[Pereira] is the only person with access to the recordings.”

But there’s a problem with this: the 30-day limit and restriction to two viewers, even the password-protecting of the footage, appears nowhere in the official surveillance policy. The document, effective since February 18, 2014, is barely two pages long and its rules are completely open to reinterpretation by RIPTA’s CEO. The two concerns the statement addresses— how long the footage is kept and who can see it—are discussed in items two and three under the “Use and Retention” section of the surveillance policy: 2. Unless otherwise required by law or court order, recordings from the surveillance system will be kept for a period of time chosen by the Chief Executive Officer.

3. Only the Chief Executive Officer and Designated Personnel from RIPTA’s Security, Claims, Legal, Human Resources, Transportation and Maintenance Departments may request or view recordings… However, the Chief Executive Officer or his or her designee may authorize additional personnel to access the recordings if doing so would further the purposes of this policy.

(Emphasis my own.)

There is a big difference between 30 days and “a period of time chosen by the CEO (unless required by law)”; between access limited to two people and access granted to designated personnel from five different departments, as well as additional viewers authorized at the discretion of the CEO in order to “further the purposes of this policy.” There is also the problem of RIPTA’s delay posting signs in Kennedy Plaza to alert bus riders that they’re being surveilled. In the document, this is expressly against the rules: “Areas subject to surveillance will be identified by signs posted at the entrance to the facilities and vehicles.” Then the policy continues, “By entering the areas subject to surveillance, individuals will consent to being observed and/ or recorded by the surveillance cameras present.” Beyond concerns of accountability, this short

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

sentence gets to the heart of why we care about surveillance: that entering public space now counts as an expression of consent to be watched.

Rhode Island ACLU policy associate Hillary Davis, the author of the original statement, feels that RIPTA’s surveillance policy insufficiently protects against abuses of privacy. “If all of the things that they mentioned in their press release are RIPTA policy, like the 30-day limit and who has access to the video, then those things need to be in the RIPTA policy,” she told the Independent. The ACLU would like to see a more thorough revision; making a promise in a press release is one thing, but if the administration were really committed to observing the restrictions on retention and access, they would be written into the official rules. When asked what specifically worried the ACLU about RIPTA’s use of surveillance, Davis said, “We believe that we have a presumption of innocence, that you need to appear guilty before you’re investigated. That is obliterated when you’re under surveillance. I don’t think people realize how much of their day is captured, how much you can follow someone throughout an entire day—every single step can be scrutinized. And I think the people of Rhode Island want their days to remain relatively private.”

Davis’s comment, along with the RIPTA policy statement that entry into space constitutes consent to be surveilled, reveals a dialectic of transparency vs. opaqueness, a practice of surveillance that functions like one-way glass. I understand my act of walking into Kennedy Plaza or boarding a bus as a choice to enter into a social space, a built environment, and an exchange: money for mobility. I don’t view the act of entering that space as an agreement to be recorded, but it is still read as such. Subjective understandings of movement through space only go so far in determining what happens to an individual in those spaces. And the fact that consent to surveillance doesn’t have to be explicit to count as consent is a reminder of that. There are still no signs in Kennedy Plaza alerting users that they are being recorded, but the footage is being taken. The subject in space is rendered transparent while the camera itself remains hidden behind opaque black glass. The system of surveillance can determine what the rules of use are and what qualifies as consent, while the individual is left with the false choice of whether or not to make their body visible—and vulnerable—by entering public space.

Movement through space involves encounters with so many systems outside of individual control, things that do not conform to subjective understandings of what they should mean. So, why is surveillance different? What is specific about its capacity to disturb us? The source of discomfort about being recorded that seems most common is that we don’t know how the footage will be used. It’s an intangible threat, built on dread of something unrealized instead of fear of something that exists. That isn’t to say that the threat posed by surveillance is never realized—it is the suddenness with which being watched can change from intangible to real violence that constitutes our discomfort.

March 6 2015

In an editorial by surveillance theorist David Lyon, he writes, “Once, police kept an eye on a specific person, suspected for some good reason of an offence... while such practices still occur, much more likely is the creation of categories of interest and classes of conduct thought worthy of attention.” He views this classificatory function of surveillance as the “phenetic fix,” as in “phenotype,” or “phenomenon”—the determination of what type of thing a subject is through their body’s performance in space. In Lyon’s definition, the phenetic fix is “to capture personal data triggered by human bodies and to use these abstractions to place people in new social classes of income, attributes, habits, preferences, or offences, in order to influence, manage, or control them.”

Lyon’s argument that the function of surveillance is to fix a subject in a category has resonance in the context of the Kennedy Plaza redevelopment, which has been criticized since the beginning by the RIPTA Riders’ Alliance, as well as editorials in The Providence Journal and Transport Providence, as an attempt to keep poor people out of the center of the city. The types of crimes that happen in bus hubs tend to be ‘quality-of-life’ crimes (like panhandling or loitering) instead of violent offenses, and strictly enforcing such minor offenses is a coded way of policing who can access public space. The invisibility of the camera behind the black glass exists reciprocally with the total visibility of a body in space, and the power to record and classify its performance. And it’s clear what the stakes are if someone is placed in a category that does not fit within the official vision of who belongs in the space—harassment, ejection, or arrest.

Experiencing surveillance as purely virtual threat is a privilege of the groups whose use of space is tacitly or explicitly licensed. The discomfort of being a subject of surveillance, knowing that your performance is being analyzed for its appropriateness, needs to incorporate an understanding that the potential threat of surveillance is much more likely to become actual violence for marginalized groups—in Kennedy Plaza, this is especially true for the homeless. The fixing of people into categories requires licensed types of spatial subjects to produce unlicensed types.

Which is to say that being surveilled is all of our business: to say otherwise would ignore that the same processes create easy access through space for some and exclusion for others.

Erin Prinz-Schwartz B’15 did Brown smoking study-inspired glitch art wayyy before RIPTA did.

metro

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BUSINESS Pleasure

thanks

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Ephermera

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MORPHOLOGY OF DEATH

by Jamie Packs

Amanita Bisporigera The Eastern North American Destroying Angel Kingdom: Fungi Division: Basidomycota Class: Agaricomycetes Order: Agaricales Family: Amanitaceae Genus: Amanita Species: A. bisporigera There’s something pulsating on the forest floor.

The Amanita Bisporigera is the most toxic North Amereican Amanita mushroom. It contains enough toxins to kill an adult human being upon ingestion. Toxins inhibit RNA polymerase II enzymes and interfere with DNA transcription, consequently hindering RNA production and protein synthesis.

This causes the premature death of cells and can ultimately lead to liver failure.

Chains of RNA throb expectantly.

Everything smells wet. It is reminiscent of being on the porch after a rainstorm, and the air has a kind of thickness to it, which is vaguely comforting.

Beneath feet, something spongy compresses.

We’re here for you.

Stages of poisoning Incubation stage: asymptomatic, six to 12 hours after ingestion Gastrointestinal stage: abdomen pain, explosive vomiting, diarrhea for up to 24 hours Cytotoxic stage: Liver damage, jaundice, hypoglycemia, acidosis, hemorrhage, hepatic encephalopathy, kidney failure, death Psalms 78:49 “And he sent upon them His hot anger, His wrath, indignation, and hostility—a band of destroying angels.”

Stem: 5.5-14 cm long; 0.5-2 cm thick Cap: 2.5-10 cm; oval, convex, bald Flesh: White Odor: Not apparent in younger specimen; becomes foul in old age Spore print: White; Spores 7-10 x 6-9 µ The touch of something strange.

Saliva Thickens.

A flash of white. A flash of darkness.

MARCH 6 2015

SCIENCE

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RACISM MAKES US SICK The Medical Repercussions of Segregation

by Jennifer Tsai

In medical school, class is scheduled for approximately 30 hours a week. This includes lectures on basic life sciences, histology, anatomy, and clinical examination skills. In addition, my first semester included approximately three hours of classroom time a month devoted to a supplemental curriculum called Health Systems and Policy, which covers the legal aspects of health care, public policy, and, briefly, health disparities. Now, in my second semester, these efforts have been largely abolished. There is no longer official time allotted for the consideration of sociopolitical issues surrounding the science that our medical training is based on. With so few hours devoted to the social implications of medical practice, I’ve begun to question whether MDs graduate prepared to engage with public health considerations.

Even within these brief sessions on health policy, we discuss only the state of healthcare inequality, without delving into reasons why these disparities continue to exist. Yet, the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ are equally important.

Medical students need to confront the greater sociopolitical context within which healthcare and medicine exist, because we aim to work within an overarching structure that continues to marginalize certain populations and identities. While the politics of unequal care and treatment is something all citizens should ponder, it is particularly important for practicing physicians to consider and care about healthcare inequity in a deeper way. Fighting health inequity cannot be divorced from our responsibility as healthcare providers; we cannot be doctors from 9–5, and citizens only once we have left the hospital.

Systems, in addition to people, are responsible for creating healthcare disparities between white people and people of color. Racism is a massive driver of “health inequity,” a concept defined by the World Health Organization as the consequence of the unequal distribution of socioeconomic, political, and environmental resources required for health.

Race is such a powerful organizing category when it comes to health inequality because of the geographical segregation that occurs based on race. In his 2009 study, sociologist Dr. Clarence Gravlee showed that even when data is controlled for income, neighborhood segregation based on race has been tied to deprivation of resources and a host of conditions correlated with low birth weight, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and lower life expectancy.

Understanding health inequity begins with understanding state-sponsored segregation and how its legacy continues to disproportionately affect the health of populations of color. +++ “Racism is in the past” In the 1930s, New Deal era housing policies, such as those implemented by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), sought to make home ownership more accessible. Unfortunately, this policy was unequally distributed across racial groups. In the two decades after the implementation of this policy, the FHA financed 60 percent of American homes, yet less than two percent of its loans went to people of color (Leif 1987). The practice of “red lining”—in which the FHA literally drew red lines around Black neighborhoods on maps, marking them as a high risk areas for mortgage default—denied Black families

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the same financial assistance as that given white families, and confined them to certain geographic locations. Such examples of government-sponsored segregation provide the foundation for health inequalities that continue to exist today.

In the 1950s, hate crimes against Blacks—arson, vandalism, property destruction, lynching—were used as a tactic to frighten away Black families wanting to move into white neighborhoods. Despite legislation like the Housing Act of 1968—which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing—real estate brokers continued to “steer” people of color to minority neighborhoods to maintain color lines and property values. For example, in the 1970s, realtors hired Black women to stroll around white neighborhoods in an attempt to scare white families into moving out of neighborhoods quickly and selling their homes at low prices, according to an article published in The Atlantic in 2014. These properties were then sold for outrageously inflated prices to Black families who had few options due to discriminatory policies that barred their access to other communities.

These practices set the stage for the mobilization of ‘White Flight’ to suburban neighborhoods—a movement inaccessible to Black families that were left in crumbling, poorly-resourced urban neighborhoods. The resulting problems included faraway health screening centers, few grocery stores, hazardous pollutants, reduced health literacy, diminished financial means, and general lack of access to health resources.

Your local hospital In Chicago, while white breast cancer mortality has halved in the last few years, largely as a result of greater mammography detection, Black breast cancer mortality has remained static (Roberts 2011). In this one city, more than 100 Black women die from breast cancer every year because they don’t have access to the same medical resources that their white counterparts do. That’s almost two Black women—mothers, daughters, wives—dying unnecessarily every week.

The correlation between lower breast cancer mortality and the development of contemporary screening protocols shows that these disparities are due to social differences rather than biological causes. Poor neighborhoods of color have fewer breast cancer screening centers, and the ones they do have are often older, of lower quality, and operated by fewer mammography specialists. Moreover, individuals on Medicaid are often forced to travel longer distances to public hospitals to obtain mammograms. Segregation creates barriers to social mobility as well as access to public and private resources, all of which continue to impact factors such as unemployment, education, and medical access.

Take Deep Breaths In 1945, the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood in Chicago was built to provide housing for Black WWII veterans (Bullard 1993). Now, in 2015, the site is referred to as a “toxic donut” due to the incredibly high concentration of surrounding hazardous plants. The housing site holds 90 percent of the city’s landfills, which includes more than 50 hazardous landfills and 250 chemical waste dumps that leak toxins into the region. These examples of Locally Unwanted Land Use (LULU) have resulted in significant increases in cancer risk, miscarriage, neonatal disorders,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

asthma, and other medical concerns. The concentration of toxic landfills—and thus exposure to health risk in this neighborhood—is not random. City officials and governance dictate the construction and placement of these hazardous sites, and it is in the execution of these decisions that the value of certain lives is explicitly and implicitly conveyed. More than 60 percent of Altgeld’s residents are below the poverty line, and 90 percent of them identify as African American (Hawthorne 2011).

Despite incredibly high rates of cancer and lung disease linked to this industrial pollution, however, there has been little progress or government attention (Bullard 1993).

Altgeld is not the exception, but the rule. Shockingly, race, even more so than socioeconomic class, is the best predictor of the location of toxic waste sites (Downey 1998). People of color are continually closer to environmental hazards that seriously impact health. The lack of progress and effort devoted to remedying these injustices, despite clear evidence of inequality, demonstrates again the intersection of sociopolitical marginalization and illness.

In Los Angeles, Latino, Black, and Asian children are twice as likely to live in traffic-heavy areas, which correlate with almost triple the frequency of asthma-induced hospital visits. To be clear, children of color are not inherently more susceptible to afflictions such as asthma; they are, however, more likely to live in neighborhoods with greater exposure to and concentration of unhealthy triggers. It’s not rare for medical students to learn about about disparate rates of asthma prevalence and severity among minority populations, yet it is rare that we take the time to examine how the history and continued presence of racism in our country creates these conditions. Without this, we receive only a fraction of the picture. As aspiring physicians, it’s foolish to focus all our energies and educational attention on combatting the aftereffects of inequality, while ignoring their causes.

increase in produce consumption in African American populations. In 2009, the US Department of Agriculture found that only eight percent of Black families (compared to 31 percent of whites) live in a census tract with a supermarket containing fresh food. In Detroit, supermarkets were on average 1.1 miles further away from impoverished Black neighborhoods than similarly impoverished white neighborhoods. A quarter of these Black households did not own a car (Zenk 2005).

The presence of food deserts—geographic areas where fresh food is limited and instead replaced by high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat fast food restaurants—is related to the history of racial segregation in the US. Food is undoubtedly related to health, considering four of the top 10 causes of death hold poor diet as a major risk factor (Zenk 2005).

If one cannot afford or access nutritious food, the risk of obesity, malnutrition, hypertension, and other medical conditions increase dramatically.

Eat your vegetables Access to fresh food resources is directly correlated to healthier eating. Research by Policy Link in collaboration with The Food Trust found that the addition of one supermarket in a census tract correlates with a 32 percent

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Health care isn’t free When you compound historical oppression with contemporary oppression, the continued limitation of social mobility and its relationship to poor health becomes increasingly apparent. According to the National Association of Home Builders, primary residence property accounts for nearly 50 percent of the median homeowner’s wealth.

Discriminatory policies from the New Deal era that prevented home ownership contribute directly to the dramatic gap between Black and white financial resources. While recent statistics show the median black-white income gap itself is large—$59,754 for whites compared to $35,416 for Blacks—the median wealth gap is startling; the average wealth is $113,149 for whites, and $5,677 for Blacks (Luhby 2012, Kochhar 2014). Racist government housing policies, which prevented Black families from obtaining home ownership and accumulating family assets accessible to white families, help account for this disparity.

In medical school, we spend weeks learning the etiology and pathophysiological mechanisms behind breast cancer and cancer biology. Our medical curriculum consistently

elevates the scientific method as the beginning and end of our training, when medical practice does not begin or end with science. While there is no doubt that this information is important to the study of medicine, information about social history, patient experience, and differential access is equally important to our careers. Bigger issues—questions on civil rights, public health, dignity, and violence—are central to our understanding of healthcare, and thereby our efforts and practice as aspiring physicians. It seems less than sufficient to quote the pharmaceutical mechanisms of asthma medication in a time when our patients walk through the streets chanting “I can’t breathe.”

Illness is devastating. It is an ever-looming specter that threatens to rob us of our lives and those of our loved ones.

Doctors seek to eliminate the products of illness, and as such, need to think more about the production of illness.

The repercussions of racism cannot continue to be isolated into silos of political consideration, or in three hours of “systems and policy” overview each month. The color of one’s skin cannot continue to dictate one’s proximity to sickness, and it is an important part of the solution for aspiring physicians to pay attention to how racial inequalities—past and present—continue to create healthcare inequity. A myopic focus on health only within the doctor’s office misses half of the equation. We cannot limit our scope of healthcare only to ideas of medical intervention.

At the end of the day, considerations of structural racism and segregation indicate why prescriptions for fresh produce are more important for combatting obesity than FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, why sending children home with inhalers will not address the cause of their asthma; why tropes of patient laziness as an explanation for poor adherence is harmful; and why systemic racism is definitively a public health concern. Information like this helps not only to bolster our medical understanding of foundations of health inequity, but convince us why caring about these issues is crucial to our professional development. Social medicine is crucial not only to our understanding of national politics and the state, but also our fundamental ability to do our job well.

JENNIFER TSAI B’14 is a different kind of med student.

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STICK ME, POKE ME, HANG ME DRY Inspired by Alex Ronan B'13's experiment for New York Magazine, where women of New York were asked to draw their boobs, we asked friends of the Indy to illustrate their next tattoo. The results make us want to call our moms.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ANXIOUS BODIES

I don’t tell people about how when I was nine I couldn’t go to sleep without counting all of the markers and pens I owned and lining them up in jars on my desk. I don’t talk about the fact that I rewrote my notes in high school so that they were color-coded and took up an even number of pages. I don’t mention the hand washing or the alphabetizing or the way that anxiety seeped into every corner of my life since I was eight years old. I don’t talk about my struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I find myself telling everything to six yogis whose names I don’t know in a coffee shop in February. We’d just finished our practice and were speaking for the first time outside of the Mysore program that meets every morning from 6–9 at Providence’s Jala Studio.

Mysore is a particular variation of Ashtanga Vinyasa, which is one of the oldest styles of yoga practiced in the Western world. Ashtanga is comprised of six series, each with between 30 and 40 poses. From the very beginning, Ashtanga practitioners know that they will probably never reach the end of the sixth series and that they may spend years perfecting primary series. Ashtanga comes with a set of strict guidelines: the same series is performed six days a week; Saturdays and the days of the full and new moon are taken off. Mysore traditionally involves the instructor ‘giving’ the next pose in the sequence to the practitioner only once the previous pose is mastered. Thus, unlike a typical yoga class in the United States where instructors lead an entire class at once, Ashtanga has each practitioner doing their sequence individually. At Jala Studio, owner and Ashtanga instructor Bristol Maryott weaves around the room offering specific instruction to each individual. Ashtanga is a deeply personal practice, but the community that emerges in the early morning hours is powerful.

Bodies store all of the trauma they have encountered; it is wound into the muscles and ligaments. Unraveling those traumas on a yoga mat can be intensely vulnerable.

The first time I took a class on hip openers I found myself with tears silently streaming down my face every time the muscles winding up the outside of my legs were stretched.

“Anxiety lives in your hips” was the explanation offered by the instructor. I’m sure she was right because since then I’ve found a respite from my relentless mental monologue in deep hip openers. I hated pigeon, with one leg bent out in front of my torso and the other extended behind, but since that first class I am grateful every day for the way that it forces emotion to surface. Accessing powerful emotions from their physical manifestation has allowed me to process them outside of the context from which they originated.

Because I don’t know how to live in the world without this practice, every morning I bring my mat and my obsessivecompulsive disorder down the hill and confront the parts of myself and my life that are stored within my body.

I started my practice when I was sixteen and stiff, overwhelmed by the judgment that came from inside my head. For ninety minutes a few times a week I could shush the incessant demands of my brain and just be in my body.

MARCH 6 2015

by Anne Fosburg illustration by Margaret Hu

It took a long time and will always be an aspect of myself that I am working on, but eventually my body became a home. Sitting up straight wasn’t a fight and my shoulders softened down from my ears, where they’d lived for as long as I could remember. I learned that it didn’t matter if I could touch my toes (I couldn’t), it mattered how I chose to dive into each pose and moment. After a year I stopped sleepwalking—something that doctors had told me was symptomatic of anxiety. At the end of my junior year of high school I threw my color-coded planner into a bonfire.

It took me many years to realize that my experience with yoga was not unique. When I started practicing I was too cripplingly shy to feel comfortable doing anything besides setting up my mat in the back corner of the room and muttering a “thank you” to the instructor after class as I shuffled out the door with my hands stuffed into my pockets. Gradually I started to make small talk with the people who had set up their mats next to mine, and finally got up the courage to give my favorite instructor a hug and tell her quietly how her class had changed by life. She didn’t say anything, just gave me a smile and squeezed me a little tighter.

I often don’t know the names of the yogis who are practicing next to me. I don’t know where the slender woman with the four gaudy rings goes in her ankle-length coat after class. I don’t know how the man with the tight hamstrings manages to ride his bicycle in the snow every day to get to the studio by 6:15 am. After three months of practice I successfully fold forward and twist myself into Marichyasana C: the arch of my left foot pressing into my right hipbone and my arms wrapped around my torso and right leg. The practitioners in the room pause and grin at me as Bristol hops up and down excitedly. I felt squashed into myself and needed help to unwind, but I had done it.

I don’t know these yogis, but I know that they will be there next to me every day as I delve into all the traumas that live in my body.

This Mysore program has been the only nonverbal community I’ve ever been a part of. I don’t want to have a conversation when I’m practicing; I want to be counting my breaths, noticing which muscles are tight, and experiencing the fear that inevitably wells up when I stretch my lower back. Each one of the yogis is invested in the development of a personal practice, but there’s a sense of tapping into a shared experience. We are each surrendering to this structure, intentionally becoming exposed. Ashtanga is not easy; it’s frustrating, often repetitive, and won’t let you get through a practice without encountering the parts of yourself that are often hidden.

Last week, when I moved from a shoulder stand into plow pose, with my back flat on my mat, my legs folded over my body, and my feet pulled behind my head, I immediately felt overwhelmingly panicked. I’ve done this pose hundreds of times, but this experience of intense anxiety was new. The rigorous structure of Ashtanga paradoxically allows for the freedom to be vulnerable, and that vulner-

ability is the reason that half a dozen yogis in the studio care about one another so deeply. In that deeply personal, individual space, we each experience something remarkable. There’s a notion in Ashtanga of surrendering fully to the structure of the practice, and then allowing it to do its work. I come back, cold morning after cold morning, to push myself a little harder because every day I feel like I know myself more completely.

Despite it’s structure, Ashtanga is not about achievement. In a lot of ways it’s exactly the opposite of the pressure-success paradigm I operated under for most of my adolescence. From the very first class it’s clear that the goal is not to finish a series or master a pose. When Bristol talks about Ashtanga it’s clear that she regards non-attachment as essential. “You can’t get wrapped up in not being able to do it. You learn to be okay with not being perfect and not being a machine and just being in your body.” There’s no guilt associated with not being able to do a pose, or progressing through the sequence slowly, or even moving backwards.

There will always be a tomorrow to try it again. There’s an elegance to a practice that exists solely for the experience of itself.

Yoga forces the practitioner to slow down. Making space or intentionally cultivating silence was never something I was encouraged to do. Upside down in a shoulder stand with my legs folded into a full lotus, knees bent and feet pressing into opposite hipbones, it’s impossible to think about anything except the orientation of my body in space and the way my breath moves through me.

I’d never experienced this kind of focus before practicing yoga. Creating space and silence is now the most important practice for me to be capable of existing in the world without feeling crushed by the weight of my own thoughts. It’s an individual orientation grounded in a personal practice, and every day I am more grateful for those who practice alongside me.

It’s 6:47 in the morning and I’m sweating. I can hear the measured, stable breath of the people next to me. I know that they are counting breaths, just like I am. Five breaths in downward-facing dog. One. Can my heels reach a little closer to the earth? Two. My hamstrings are tight from the walk down the hill. Three. Release the tension in my jaw.

Four. Don’t forget to press into finger pads. Five. I pause to smile at the woman next to me who’s just stood up from a graceful backbend. It takes me a little more than an hour to work through the series that I’ve been building on for the past five months. I fold my legs into a lotus pose, plant my hands outside my hips and lift myself up for ten breaths before lying down into savasana, the resting pose at the end of the series. By the time I open my eyes sunlight is streaming through the windows and my mind is quiet.

ANNE FOSBURG B’16 can touch her toes now.

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TWO VARIETIES OF HAPPINESS

by Kyle Giddon illustration by Caroline Brewer

Near Plano TX the schoolgirls’ best nineteen years old and upward swept has pledged her spring-bright face to a wealthy octogenarian whose skin hangs like a towel drying on a fishhook.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

coffee tasting 3PM // New Harvest Coffee Roasters, Hope Artiste Village, 1005 Main Street, Pawtucket // free

st. vincent 8PM / Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington Street, Providence, RI // $25 (advance), $30 (day-of)

So rarely do things that will give you the skills to be a snob cost so little money.

St. Vincent’s Digital Witness Tour comes to Providence after rolling all around the world since the release of St. Vincent last February. Both the tour and the album it supports play around with rigidity and fluidity, and the people we are online and off-.

keynote: decolonizing the racialized female subject 4PM // Studio 1, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts,

slater mills tours 10AM - 4PM (any time in that window) // Slater Mill Museum, 67 Roosevelt Ave, Pawtucket // $12 (adults), $10 (students)

154 Angell St, Providence // free Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama, a professor at the University of the West Indies and author of both fiction and nonfiction on race, class, gender, and embodiment, will give the keynote address of this two-day conference, the full title of which is Decolonizing the Racialized Female Subject: Black and Indigenous Self-Making Under Empire. The conference continues Saturday with a faculty panel— same time, same place. blue man group Ongoing through March 8 // Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset Street, Providence // $38 - $78

Three men dressed in black will perform various feats.

Their faces will be painted blue, and they will act with humorous abandon. There will be matinees. vudu sister with the dead girls // harris hawk // pixels // dead cats dead rats 9 PM // Dusk // 301 Harris Ave, Providence // $5

Vudu Sister with the Dead Girls: The sludgier, punkier version of the Sister featuring former Wrong Reasons members (Damien Puerini, Joe Principe and Shaun Chevalier) Harris Hawk: A heavy, riff-driven, female-fronted, forwardlooking retro distortion bomb from Boston Pixels (Providence) American band, sings love songs; elegies of the twentieth-century Dead Cats Dead Rats (Boston) “The self-labeled grungepunk trio doesn’t try to pigeonhole their sound for the sake of lofty industry ambitions, and they continue to play the kind of rock and roll they fell in love with.” - Hilary Jane Hughes

Get a guided path through the museum rather than weaving your way through.

why do they do it? explaining jihadist militancy in western countries 12PM - 1:30 PM // Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St, Providence // free

Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, has been collecting data on Western Jihadists since 2006. She’ll talk about organization and ideology in Islamist extremism, moving through recent events in France and Belgium. The name of this lecture makes me think this might be a good one to go to with critical questions prepared.

tours for tots: shape shifting 2PM // RISD Museum, 20 North Main St, Providence // free w/ registration

The next generation of artists are ages 3-5 with adult companions. Register at risdmuseum.org neil diamond 8PM // Dunkin Donuts Center, 1 La Salle Square, Providence // $65 - $150

Look at those ticket prices! Neil Diamond is a walled garden.

mannequin pussy, ben katzman’s degreaser, way out, sad family 9PM // Spark City, email sparkcityprovidence@gmail.com for address // $6

Philly punks Mannequin Pussy come to Spark City, with 3/4-Indy Sad Family as openers. spring recycling 8AM - 1PM // Roger Williams Park Zoo, 1000 Elmwood Avenue, Providence // free

I’m a little bit hesitant to publicize this event because I think it might actually break the entire system of American capitalism. So keep this a secret: if you bring your hazardous waste (oil-based paints, pesticides, e-waste, etc) to Roger Williams Park Zoo, you can exchange it for a free zoo ticket.

crankie-makers and singers of old songs from the virginia mountains and baltimore 7 PM // AS220 // 115 Empire St, Providence, Rhode Island // $6 - 10 sliding scale

Anna and Elizabeth: acclaimed young ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle of Rural Retreat Virginia, and Baltimore based fiddler Anna Roberts-Gevalt who learned to play fiddle and banjo in visits to Eastern Kentucky. The two have shared their crankies and harmonies in country stores, living rooms, classrooms, fine art museums and concert halls across the United States, and abroad in Uzbekistan and Ireland. plus CRANKIES made by PROVIDENCE ARTISTS: fay strongin (with laura brown-lavoie and nupur shridhar) naomi polina + Ramshackle Enterprises

congress for new urbanism, new england chapter presents: tactical urbanism 5PM - 7PM // Aurora, 276 Westminster Street, Providence // free

One of the speakers invites us to “learn how PopUp Providence, the City’s take on tactical urbanism, has highlighted local talent through small scale interventions in the City’s public realm.” Okay, sure, sounds a little Portlandia, but finding out a way to better inhabit your city is always a positive thing. police profiling: causes and consequences 7PM - 9PM // Metcalf Research Laboratory Auditorium, 190194 Thayer St, Providence // free

This event was originally scheduled for Monday, February 2, when Providence was hit by a blizzard. Moderated by Professor Tricia Rose, this panel will feature a discussion between Chris Burbank, the commissioner of the Salt Lake City Police Department; Farhana Khera, the President and Executive Director of Muslim Advocates; and Heather Ann Thompson, a professor in History and African American Studies at Temple University. The panel will focus on “police policies that have fueled extensive racial and other profiling, the expansion of mass incarceration and the effects these policies and practices.” The event is free and open to the public.

art + design lab for high school students: mapping (in) the museum 3:30 PM - 6 PM // RISD Museum, 20 North Main St, Providence // free w/ registration

A workshop for high schoolers on maps and navigation—what to do when you’re lost, and the guides we give ourselves. “Though mapping exercises both practical and fantastic we’ll navigate personal, art historical, and spatial borders, territories, and relationships.” Hnnnnngggg. Just one in a long list of reasons I wish I were 16 again. Sign up at risdmuseum.org outside the box: a cardboard show opening 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM // Providence CityArts for Youth, Inc. // 891 Broad St, Providence, Rhode Island 02907

You thought that cardboard boxes were only used to move out of your parents’ house? Well, think again. Join CItyArts as they showcase artists who transform the material into models, masks, sculpture, furniture and things you never even thought before. pauly shore 8PM // Comedy Connection, 39 Warren Ave, East Providence // $25

Ugh.