The College Hill Independent V.30 N.6

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT V 30 N 06 | MAR 13 2015 A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 6

NEWS

INTERVIEWS

02 Week in Review

jamie packs & sebastian clark

METRO

dash elhauge

09 Laughing Matters

EPHEMERA

sienna zeilinger

12 Oasis

ARTS

john sant

13 No Country for Women

brock lownes

SPORTS 15 Dirty Dancing

selection committee

FEATURES 05 Go. Ready. Set.

FROM THE EDITOR S

mika kligler

08 Command Q

malcolm drenttel

07 Fancy Pants

03 DARE to be Different

TECHNOLOGY

04 Pigs with Guns

ria vaidya & himani sood

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 Elizabeth Goodspeed MVP Wilson Cusack

LITERARY 11 Earl Grey grace abe

17 Boy Next Door lili rosenkranz

X 18 Melting layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

On October 17, 2014, two women who attend Brown University were given a date rape drug at a Phi Kappa Psi party on Brown’s campus. The following day, one of the women reported to the university that another student had sexually assaulted her. On February 21, following several months of investigation at the end of which Brown University deemed laboratory evidence “inconsistent,” the University dropped disciplinary proceedings against the accused students. It seems probable that one of the accused’s family ties to the Brown Corporation have played a role in the University’s decision to drop the hearings. This decision follows several semesters of campus-wide activism in response to the University’s prior mishandlings of sexual assault. Brown is one of 68 colleges and universities currently under investigation by the US Department of Education for its (mis)handling of cases of sexual assault.

The College Hill Independent stands in solidarity with survivors of sexual assault and joins fellow students and community members in demanding that the University deliver justice in this case—regardless of Corporation ties and regardless of administrative mishandling of evidence—and that it do so transparently.

For its ongoing failure to adequately address instances of assault on campus, the Indy holds Brown University responsible for the perpetuation of sexual violence. We encourage readers to take note of their place in institutions that continue to deny justice to survivors of sexual assault and that obscure the processes by which they adjudicate cases of violence. #moneytalksatbrown

sara winnick

100 per/cent love.

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN EDUCATION

by Jamie Packs & Sebastian Clark

MARCH 13 2015

Easy as ABC

N is for “Nuisance Flooding”

Substitute teachers have an almost mythic allure. They alone offer high school students the prospect of a brief hiatus from the grueling task of learning. And with what happened in Columbus, Ohio this last week, the folklore surrounding the substitute is sure to continue. Substitute teacher Sheila Kearns was convicted on four counts of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles for screening a movie called The ABCs of Death in an East High School Spanish class.

One reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes calls The ABCs of Death “two hours of brutality, excrement, and viscera.” Another calls it a “repulsive and excessive excuse of blood-soaked entertainment.” The film, which is composed of 26 gory and sometimes sexual vignettes, apparently doesn’t suit the Spanish language curriculum of East High School, despite the fact that three whole vignettes are, in fact, in Spanish. At least the kids probably learned the meaning of the word muerte.

In court, Kearns pleaded negligence, stating that her back was turned away from the screen and she was thus unaware of the film’s excessive depictions of sex and violence (segments like “M is for miscarriage” or “O is for orgasm” sound particularly troubling in this regard). The judge for the case, Charles A. Schneider, called her claim “unconscionable,” and said he sees the incident as a symptom of an ailing public school system in Columbus: “They put a permanent substitute in a high-school Spanish class who can’t speak Spanish at all. Here we are, with the Columbus public schools telling us what wonderful things [they] are doing.” Schneider clearly fails to see the educational potential of gore—surely a film whose trailer proudly advertises itself as “appalling” has something to teach today’s youth.

Kearns was sentenced to 90 days in prison in addition to a three-year probation, and has had her substitute teaching license permanently revoked. The conviction is operating under the presumption that Kearns distributed the material with “knowledge of the content,” as Ohio state law outlines. “I am sorry. I should have watched the movie,” Kearns apologized during her hearing, although apparently not convincingly enough. For Kearns, the outcome of the case is rather grim, especially considering the almost comical level of thoughtlessness that she professed (not to mention her poor taste in movies). But if anyone came out on top in this situation, it was undoubtedly the makers of The ABCs of Death, a film that was thoroughly panned by critics upon its release and lost money in the box office. There is almost no better advertisement for a horror movie than the fact that its screening literally sent someone to jail.

Plus I’ve heard there’s a sequel.–JP

According to climatologists, Florida is the most susceptible state to rising sea levels, threatening 30 percent of its beaches over the next 85 years. Yet it emerged this week that its governor banned thousands of employees at its Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) from uttering the three terms with which you would expect it be most concerned: ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ and ‘sustainability.’

A report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) describes the rule as “unwritten,” tying it to the 2011 election of Republican governor Rick Scott and his subsequent appointment of a new department director, Herschel Vinyard Jr. Pressure to abide was regularly asserted by both agency supervisors and lawyers external to the agency. Insider accounts say the interdict affected every aspect of the department’s operations, influencing its educational material as well as the allocation of its $1.4 billion budget.

For the department’s many highly educated environmentalists, this new inconvenient truth was hard to swallow. “We were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” Kristina Trotta, a former DEP employee in Miami, said. “Sealevel rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding.’ ” It should come as no surprise, then, that in 2014, just before his reelection, Gov. Scott admitted “I’m not a scientist.” –SC

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SPOKES IN THE WHEEL A Conversation with DARE's Fred Ordoñez

by Mika Kligler illustration by Andres Chang Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) is a grassroots community organizing force based on the southside of Providence. Through door-knocking, workshops, lobbying, and direct action, DARE works to mobilize low-income neighborhoods around campaigns of their own making; recent foci have included tenant rights, probation reform, unshackling of pregnant prisoners, and ban the box. Last summer, DARE helped lead the successful fight for Rhode Island’s new Just Cause Eviction legislation. Here I speak with Executive Director Fred Ordoñez about media visibility and the nitty-gritty of left-wing Providence politics.

The College Hill Independent: How responsive do you find your elected officials in general?

Fred Ordoñez: Our whole system of governance is pretty messed up. They’re in it for power. Some of them have ideals, like: if I sell out so much, eventually I’ll be able to do something good. But they all end up just doing horrible things. And money and politics—the fact that money is considered freedom of speech is one of the key things. It’s a game to them. But within this game we still try to overpower with people. With numbers. It’s usually a lot of arm-twisting that we have to do. Sometimes there are some legislators at the state level, or some city council people that will be with us from the beginning. But that’s a minority. It’s usually people of color. But, yeah, it’s an uphill battle.

The Indy: But DARE does have city council members who are pretty reliably on your side: Luis Aponte, Carmen Castillo, Mary Kay Harris. Do you think DARE has to a certain extent permeated city politics, at least more so than other left wing Providence organizations? Is that relationship as antagonistic as you’re framing it?

FO: I wouldn’t say more than other left wing organizations…217, the union, has a direct connection to Carmen Castillo. Jobs with Justice probably has more sway than DARE does with the city council. I mean, we have established relationships the hard way. We’ve had champions in the past, like for instance Miguel Luna, huge champion of DARE. Mary Kay Harris was an organizer here at DARE for 13 years, so that’s really exciting for us. This sort of inside/ outside stuff…

I’ll tell you a story. I used to get into big debates with Miguel Luna before his passing. We were friends, and we’d have these big debates about being part of the system versus challenging it from the outside. How much compromise is there once you’re inside, how much do you lose? Miguel would tell me that it’s important to be on the inside for all kinds of reasons, and for the most part I didn’t see it until his passing. Because Miguel used to come to us and alert us when the city council was up to something terrible. And he’d come to us at a point where we could do something about it.

Contracts weren’t written up, things weren’t sold, deals weren’t done. And I didn’t know how valuable that was until his passing; it does make a difference, we do lose ground. We’re losing ground all the time.

So once in a while we have really good champions, but they get marginalized. That’s what happens when they don’t

sell out: they get marginalized. If you speak to city council people or politicians now about Miguel Luna, they’re all 'how great he was,' but while he was living they fucking went totally out of their way to diminish anything he was trying to do.

The Indy: So when you have those people inside, how do you find a balance—because it seems like it’s important for DARE to frame itself as an outsider organization politically, in terms of rallying strategies and making change. Is that true?

FO: No, I don’t think so. DARE will go so far as to say that our democracy is not real, that we live in an oligarchy, a plutocracy, however you want to say it. But it is possible to take our own communities back. It is possible to take our own local government back. We don’t say it’s a lost cause, and we say folks should try to take it back. So I don’t think we go out of our way to say we’re an outsider group… Although having a couple of champions, that doesn’t really make you an insider. It just means that people got together to put someone good in there. So we’re not so idealistic that we think we can ignore the system. At the very least, we have to stick a spoke in the wheel of the system, to stop it from running us over, really, cause that’s what it’s doing. Ignoring would mean we’d just keep getting run over.

The Indy: So if elected officials aren’t responsive, then you engage in direct action.

FO: Yeah, so we have that in our back pocket. We try the normal channels until we get to a barrier where it’s just one decision-maker or a group of decision-makers refusing to do the right thing, regardless of what regular channels we use and how long we try those regular channels. Then we upscale it to bring the problem home to them, in their face, so that they can’t do what they do in the dark, where people don’t see it.

We bring dozens if not hundreds of people to their office or to their place of work or to their daughter’s wedding if we need to, to say no, this is what’s happening.

The Indy: Right. So when it comes to direct action, does DARE have an ethos of protesting? Are you all strictly nonviolent?

FO: It's what the campaign calls for. That's really important in the distinction between us and other groups and folks that may like to protest. We run campaigns to win institutional change, so the level of our actions is determined by the goals of the campaign. Non-violence is important to us for the safety of our people, especially since a lot of folks have criminal records. In our community we can't do certain things without serious consequences. So non-violence is usually the way we go.

The Indy: How involved was DARE with the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Providence last fall? What was the sentiment at DARE regarding how things played out?

FO: DARE members were involved. DARE members went on the marches and were part of the highway shutdown. We

as DARE love that it's an organic movement led by young folks, so we've sort stepped back to let them be the lead on this. And have not stepped in to say you have to do this and you have to do that, and to take up space or that sort of thing.

We're supportive in any way that we can be. But we don't want to take over in any way. Even though we may be accused of like, that's what we do, but that's just people misunderstanding what we do. We get called [by the media] and when I get called, I say, listen, you need to talk to the folks who are involved. Why are you asking us and the NAACP what we think of the protests? You need to talk to the protesters themselves. So I try to turn it back around.

The Indy: In line with that, do you feel like DARE is aptly represented in the media in Providence?

FO: No, definitely not. Well, sometimes, you know, it depends. Often we’re dealing with the Providence Journal, which is a pretty right wing publication. And news likes to reflect what their viewers like, and their viewers are mostly racist white people, you know. So they kind of spin our stuff in a negative way. But sometimes when we do do something, we don’t get credit for it. For instance the Ray Kelly protest, which was largely made up of our members, got spun in the media as a bunch of spoiled rich brats. So when it’s convenient, we’re the bad guy, and when they don’t want to give us credit, they don’t.

The Indy: You mentioned how media news sources will call DARE or the NAACP even if you guys don’t have that much to do with what’s going on. Other left-wing organizations in Providence—Fuerza Laboral, for instance—have a lot of trouble getting media visibility. Why do you think DARE has come to occupy such a visible role?

FO: Well I’m not... as somebody who’s running an organization that struggles every year to exist, I don’t think that we’re that visible. So I’m not really sure. I mean sometimes newspapers are trying to sell a sensationalist story, and they want to stick in something that the far left would say about an issue. And they know that we do our work through a racial lens, and we’ve been we’ve been a thorn that won’t go away for twenty-eight years. They know we’re here. So they might turn to us when they want to sensationalize, pit once side against the other.

The Indy: While we’re on the topic of DARE working through a racial lens, do you see a future where the Providence Police Department could be reformed, where it could be non-oppressive and non-racist? Or do you think the police institution in general, in Providence and in this country, needs to be dismantled?

FO: That’s a good question. The best thing would be for it to be dismantled. But reform is also still real. See that’s the thing—privileged folks, idealists that don’t deal with the brunt of the problem can sit back and say: reform doesn’t make any difference. But folks who are taking the brunt of the problems—the beat-downs, the incarceration, the evictions—these reforms do make a big difference in their day-to-day lives.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TANKS IN THE BACKYARD Police militarization in Providence

by Malcom Drenttel illustration by Eli NeumanHammond In 2006 Glenn Reynolds wrote about the threat of police militarization in Popular Mechanics: “Soldiers and police are supposed to be different. Soldiers are aimed at enemies from outside the country. They are trained to kill those enemies, and their supporters. In fact, ‘killing people and breaking things’ are their main reasons for existence. Police look inward. They’re supposed to protect their fellow citizens from criminals, and to maintain order with a minimum of force.”

Following the appearance of an MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle on the streets of Ferguson, MO this summer, police militarization has grabbed mainstream public attention once again. Commentators began to wonder what a vehicle designed— as its name suggests—for mine-laden battlefields, was doing in a suburban landscape facing off unarmed protesters. Proponents of militarization say that a well-armed police will be better able to keep the citizenry safe, but this logic has been attacked from both sides of the political spectrum.

Conservatives view the process as yet another example of ‘Big Government,’ and further evidence for Madison’s prophetic statement in the Federalist Papers: “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” The left, on the other hand, has framed the phenomenon as an extension of the systemic racism and state-sponsored violence that pervades our legal system: as the police spend most of their energies arresting Black people, a militarized police signals that Black people are now viewed as combatants rather than citizens. As a national issue, the debate over police militarization is as alive in Rhode Island as anywhere.

Ferguson’s police department acquired their MRAP through a government program created by section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997. The program, an expansion of the older 1208 program, enables any police department in the country to request decommissioned military gear.

Interested departments need only pay for shipping and maintenance; the exchange is otherwise considered a donation. While the 1208 program was focused on bolstering the front lines of the War on Drugs, the 1033 update broadened the program’s scope to the War on Terrorism. Since its founding, the program has furnished $5.1 billion worth of military hardware to somewhere between 8,000 (according to the Department of Defense) and 17,000 (according to the ACLU) police departments. This massive discrepancy between the Department of Defense’s numbers and the ACLU’s estimate stems from poor record keeping on the part of the agency assigned to handle the distribution of hardware: the Law Enforcement Support Office. (One sample of LESO files found that 74 percent were incorrect, with more than 43 percent of police departments receiving more equipment than approved). The 1033 program offers police departments the whole gamut of military leftovers; everything from helicopters to generators, nightvision goggles to fax machines. Some of the hardware available is in poor condition, but almost a third is brand new and left over from the military’s decelerating engagements in the Middle East.

The bulk of the donations have been non-lethal gear, and many smaller departments—otherwise unable

MARCH 13 2015

to afford new computers or medical supplies—have been grateful to receive the military’s surplus. This is, however, perhaps the most lucid example of the program’s flaws: the process of ordering an armored vehicle has been made as easy as that of requesting airconditioning units or sleeping bags. This, along with the office’s shoddy record-keeping, is indicative of the 1033 program’s lighthearted take on tools of destruction. On the LESO’s website for “Disposition Services,” featuring a layout not unlike that of your average lowbudget online store, one can easily find the application to participate in the 1033 program. It is one page long.

(Although, to purchase aircraft, police departments must fill out an additional single-page form). This hyper-efficient disposition system serves to encourage the over-arming of local police forces.

The Providence Police Department has ordered relatively little through the program, acquiring one armored truck and 18 rifles for its nearly 450 sworn officers. This is consistent with nationwide trends. Large police departments typically have larger budgets and can more easily afford expensive equipment without federal aid. Smaller Rhode Island police departments, however, have taken greater advantage of the program.

Coventry has received over 1,500 pieces of military gear, including 54 silencers, two Humvee construction kits, and upwards of $750,000 of night vision gear.

The department’s 166 sworn officers work in a city of 44,000, which has a crime rate around half that of the US average. Johnston, on the other hand, has acquired around 2,400 items including: two bomb-disposal robots, three IED training kits, 10 tactical trucks, 30 units of armorplating, 35 assault rifles, close to 600 high-capacity rifle magazines, more than 100 infrared gun sights and two pairs of anti-mine footwear. While the town has never seen mine warfare, its 71 officers do have to defend 29,000 people from just under 50 violent crimes per year. Compared with the size and relative tranquility of these towns, these acquisitions are clearly unjustified. These tools—designed for warfare against well organized combatants intent on murder— have no place in the arsenals of departments whose main tasks include preventing vandalism, bar fights, and domestic abuse. If any armament is needed for these duties, it is improved community relations.

James Vincent, president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, told GoLocalProv.com that “the use of military force—especially when there is no relationship of trust with the community—only escalates matters, ultimately proving ineffective.” The militarization of police is part of a larger trend of growing distance between the police and the communities they are suppos-

edly assigned to protect. This disconnect is embodied in the 1033 program in that there is no civilian oversight for department acquisitions and no requirements regarding department-community relations. According to the LESO’s website, the requirements for participation in the 1033 program are as follows: 1. Is the agency’s primary function the enforcement of laws?

2. Is the agency’s officers properly compensated?

3. Do the agency’s officers have the powers of arrest and apprehension?

Grammatical errors aside, these requirements can be reduced to the essential questions: is the agency a police force, and does it pay its officers? While proper compensation for police officers is certainly a good and important qualification for any agency requesting access to military helicopters or sniper rifles, notably absent are qualifications regarding the agency’s standings in their communities, or the communities’ opinions regarding the presence of heavy weaponry in their backyards.

Coventry’s citizens might be very surprised to discover the powerful weaponry of their police department, because only the Rhode Island 1033 state coordinator—appointed by the Governor—oversees the acquisitions of the state’s police departments. After this past summer’s protests in Ferguson—and the infamous images of the army sent to deal with the demonstrators—one can only wonder why these factors are not considered. Should a police department with a poor record of race relations be allowed to order battle-grade tactical gear? And what if a department poorly represents those it is meant to defend? Here in Providence, the police department demographically over-represents the city’s white population by nearly 40 percent, while the Hispanic population is under-represented by about 25 percent. In 2014, FiveThirtyEight put together an analysis of the demographic representation in police departments in the 75 largest cities in America. Providence wasn’t large enough to make the list, but, as RIFuture.org points out, it would’ve scored among the three least representative departments in the country if placed alongside those cities.

Obviously neither police militarization nor better demographic representation can alone resolve American law enforcement’s multiform problems. Both issues do, however, stem from a growing gap between communities and those assigned to defend them. This past July the Providence Police Department was awarded the Community Policing Department of the Year Award by the New England Association of Chiefs of Police (NEACOP). The image of one group of police congratulating another group of police for its community work contrasts vividly with that of November’s protest following the non-indictment of Darren Wilson. For those marching alongside organizations like End Police Brutality PVD, there was a sense of anger and distrust that was unacknowledged at the sunny award ceremony just three months before. It is clearer now more than ever that police departments should give more consideration to public opinion. If people don’t feel safe around police, the police are not doing their job, and may be veering dangerously close to Madison’s “tyranny at home.”

MALCOLM DRENTTEL B’18 is so safe it scares him.

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SAVE THE CHILDREN? The childhood education debate that’s really about adults

by Sara Winnick illustration by Soyoon Kim According to Leanne Barrett, senior analyst at the policy and advocacy center Kids Count Rhode Island, five state departments currently oversee the creation, funding, and administration of early childhood education services for children ages zero to five in Rhode Island. The Departments of Education; Human Services; Children, Youth, and Families; Health; and the Medicaid Office manage four major avenues through which the state’s youngest students access critical pre-Kindergarten services. Barrett calls this infrastructure “fragmented and uncoordinated” at best. In the middle of a recent conversation with the Independent, she laughed and stated, “It’s all so complicated you’ll never be able to fit it into one article.”

Barrett uses an image of four overlapping circles to illustrate the four options low and middle-income families use to access affordable early childhood education services. The first circle is the Child Care Subsidy System, which issues a tax credit to working families with children aged younger than 12 in public or private care. According to a 2013 Kids Count policy brief, Rhode Island subsidizes early education for 7, 616 children a year—roughly four percent of the state’s three to five year-olds.

Second, families in the lowest income bracket in the state can benefit from the federally funded Head Start and Early Head Start pre-Kindergarten and daycare programs. Head Start provides early learning development and social service supports like mental health counseling, dental care, and medical checkups to families.

Almost 10 percent of Rhode Island’s three to five year olds are currently enrolled in Head Start programs.

In 2008, a coalition of early childhood education advocates created a third early education circle by passing the Rhode Island Pre-Kindergarten Education Act, which resulted in a fully funded state program ranking top four in the country for quality. The program currently serves only 234 students in the state, or the two percent of RI four-year-olds lucky enough to be selected in the lottery process. The Coalition hopes to raise that number to 1,000 students in the next two years.

The fourth circle, “always forgotten,” according to Barrett, is special education services. The 2004 emendation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act extended federal responsibility for providing “free and appropriate public education” to students with special needs from birth through age 21. The law requires that schools “locate and identify” children with disabilities or developmental delays, and provide childcare and early childhood services to prepare young children for public education.

There is, of course, a fifth way to receive early childhood education services for newborns to five year olds in Rhode Island: for parents to pay for those services out of pocket.

Though costs of preschool vary drastically by region, Childcare Aware Advocacy estimates the average cost of preschool in the Northeast is $9,600 per year. Federal guidelines for affordable childcare state that a program is affordable if it costs

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FEATURES

less than 10 percent of a family’s annual income, which means that only families with annual incomes of $96,000 or more—approximately 22 percent of Rhode Island households—can afford to educate their youngsters.

The messiness of Barrett’s four-circle, five-department drawing is not a product of conflicting research about what early childhood education can do for children. After decades of research, there is little debate that early childhood education is cost effective with long-lasting gains. The forty-year Perry Preschool study found that early childhood education significantly and positively affected students’ future educational attainment, employment status, home ownership, incarceration rates, and physical health metrics. The Abecedarian Project similarly found that a five-year early intervention program resulted in higher academic performance, greater likelihood of attending college and obtaining employment, and less likelihood of teenage pregnancy and drug use for the students it served.

The bureaucratic, low quality, hugely expensive system of early education is incongruous with the substantial demonstrated positive impacts a cohesive system would have for children. The messiness of the Rhode Island and US landscape around early childhood programming, however, is not a product of what the government is willing to do for children. The history of early childhood education shows that the lack of universal, affordable pre-Kindergarten services in the United States is a product of what the government is willing to do for adults. +++ On May 18, 1965, one week before Mother’s Day, before an audience of 250 women in the White House Rose Garden, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech about children. “We set out to make certain that poverty’s children would not be forevermore poverty’s captives. We called our program Project Head Start.”

Head Start marked the first attempt at federal provision of affordable pre-school for low-income children. Key to creating this early childhood intervention program, and placing childcare on the national policy agenda, was the rising influence of the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s. Between 1950-1969, the number of women in the workforce with children under six tripled, creating an increased need for childcare and early education services.

Though the gendered impulse of Head Start at its May 18 launch party were obvious, the Johnson administration framed the program in explicitly childrencentric terms. “Five and six year-old children are the inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” said the President. “Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation like a family birthmark.”

This “save the children” appeal permeated early calls for Head Start and was extremely politically expedient.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

It took the focus of early childhood education away from the program’s primary advocates and secondary benefiters. Mothers, especially working-class, single mothers of color, are a more politically difficult group to advocate for in the United States.

By focusing on children, “the inheritors of poverty” rather than “its creators,” and helped along by the ever expanding welfare state of the post-War, Civil Rights Era, Johnson created a broad coalition of Head Start supporters. Feminists, researchers, physicians, educators, and democratic politicians alike were able to come together and secure $70 million for the Head Start pilot program.

Unfortunately, this broad base of support resulted in confusion about where to locate control at the department level. The program was initially housed in the Office of Economic Opportunity and funded through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. It served 560,000 children in the summer of 1965. +++ Although Washington’s PR campaign focused on the youth, Head Start was intended from the start to empower both children and parents living in poverty. Head Start’s initial mission was two-fold: close the gap in school readiness between rich and poor students and provide community controlled day care centers to serve as parent-advocate training grounds for poor communities. Polly Greenberg, founder of a Mississippi Head Start, explained that Head Start attempted to change the “political equation” between politicians and Head Start community members. Unfortunately, as Education Historian Elizabeth Rose writes in The Promise of Preschool, “not everyone was so enthusiastic about empowering poor black parents.”

Two people especially unenthusiastic about the prospect of a political cohort of empowered Black parents were 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon and anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly. Though Nixon ultimately vetoed the legislation that would have created universal access to affordable early education, he campaigned for the 1968 election on the promise of uniting the disparate strands of Head Start funding and providing universal early childhood education through federal legislation.

Nixon initially adapted the child-centric rhetoric; in a campaign advertisement he stated, “I see the face of a child. What his color is, what his ancestry is, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he is an American child.” Nixon drastically changed his pro-children rhetoric and pro-preschool stance in the three years to come.

The Nixon administration’s 1971 Child Development Act was an enormous piece of legislation that guaranteed not only national free pre-Kindergarten services for three to five year-olds across the country, but also funds for after-school programs, meals, medical assistance, and dental care for poor families. Countless women’s, educational, and religious groups, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and both houses of Congress endorsed the bill.

Schlafly fiercely opposed the bill, stating that it was a “radical attempt for the government to take over the raising of children.”

She began a very vocal and visible anti-preschool campaign, mobilizing thousands of Republican women to call their senators.

Editorials entitled “Child Development Act—To Sovietize our Youth” and “Big Brother Wants Your Children” appeared in Times Magazine and the New York Times.

That year, Nixon vetoed the bill that his administration wrote and that his Congress overwhelmingly passed. Nixon not only vetoed the bill, but also issued a powerful ideological renouncement of its values. The veto categorized the $2 billion financing the Child Development Act as “a long leap into the dark.” It ominously predicted that the bill would obligate “the federal government to plunge headlong financially into child development [and] would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing over and against the family-centered approach.” Patrick Buchanan, advisor to Nixon and author of the 1971 veto, added, “taking children out of the home… didn’t seem to be traditionally American.”

Nixon’s 1971 veto not only stopped the development of universal early childhood education in its tracks, but also changed the rhetoric of the debate from focusing on children to centering around families. The change in focus from children to families allowed anti-early childhood education advocates to bring adults— specifically, adults living in poverty—into the conversation. In

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the context of the 1970s, when early childhood education was synonymous with Head Start, “families” became coded language for adults—specifically mothers living in poverty. In the national imagination, these mothers were thought to be single and primarily Black. +++ Although Reagan’s myth of the Welfare Queen was still 16 years away from being coined, the specter of pathological black motherhood looms in the ideological undermining of the 1971 Child Development Act. Nixon stated that he vetoed the bill in order to avoid committing the “vast moral authority” of the government to the side of “communal approaches to childrearing over the family centered approach.” The word “communal,” and the phrase “not traditionally American” invoke an otherness associated with Black families particularly salient in the late 60s and early 70s following Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for Family Action.” Moynihan’s report was a seminal sociological text that blamed matriarchal family structures for structural poverty in the Black community. Moynihan identified overpowering Black mothers as the cause of Black poverty and racial inequality; it resounded powerfully with a national imagination of dysfunctional Black families.

Nixon’s 1971 veto could not rescind the commitments and existing infrastructure of early childhood education services that already existed from Johnson’s Head Start launch. The coalition that had been so integral to early education’s initial success now created a complicated bureaucratic mix of infrastructure, money and policy. Without the 1971 legislation, there was no way to unify these streams into one cohesive department or program. +++ Three decades later, the affects of Nixon’s 1971 veto and his ideological undermining of pro-child early education advocacy are still being felt. Two percent of low-income mothers in Rhode Island benefit from the state’s pre-Kindergarten program, 10 percent enroll their child in a Head Start program, and eight percent have their child identified as a student with special needs. If a mother is employed, her child could be one of the four percent of the state’s children whose pre-school costs are covered by a tax credit from the federal government. Even if a mother is able to place her child in care, there is no guarantee of what quality care that child will receive. According to PBS documentary Raising America, most child-care workers are paid less than parking attendants. And those workers are disproportionately poor women of color, likely not making enough money to pay for their own children’s early education costs.

Despite all this, Leanne Barrett is optimistic about the possibility of equal access to early childhood education and childcare in the years to come. She says that even in the face of “a terrible recession, the threat of sequesters, and constant congressional gridlock,” early childhood advocates are making “incremental progress” towards affordability and universality. Last year in his state of the Union Address, President Obama called for legislation making “high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old.” This fall, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised universal pre-Kindergarten services to every four year-old in the city.

This January, Obama resurrected calls for federally provided childcare that have been off the national political agenda since the Head Start Days of the late 60s. Avoiding one-dimensional pro-children language, Obama attempted to advocate for early education services on behalf of low-income parents. “When having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, we need affordable, high-quality childcare more than ever,” he said. Possibly in an attempt to distance childcare debates from welfare queen stereotypes, Obama’s 2015 State of the Union also de-gendered the debate. “It’s time we stop treating childcare as a side issue, or as a women’s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us,” he said. The next presidential administration, however, will get to determine who the “us” includes.

SARA WINNICK B’15 wants to Sovietize our youth (jk?).

FEATURES□ 06

FROM 'MANLINESS' TO

DANDINESS In February, The Council of Fashion Designers of America announced that it is launching a men’s fashion week—a move that highlights the growing importance and profitability of menswear in the fashion industry. This trend, however, isn’t restricted to the high-end world of New York fashion.

According to a 2014 study by Bain & Company, since the depths of the economic downturn in 2009, growth in the market for men’s ready-to-wear has outpaced that of womenswear, increasing between nine and 13 percent yearon-year. Now luxury fashion brands like Hermes, Prada, and Lanvin are opening menswear-only stores and expanding their product range. According to a Euromonitor report, men have been spending more on their outfits each year for well over a decade now; menswear sales, adjusted for inflation, are up 70 percent since 1998. The silk ceiling is shattering as the menswear market is expected to top $450 billion in 2015. +++ The recent surge in menswear can be understood in the context of the history of the dandy. Since the eighteenth century, dandies spared no expense in defining their self worth through their clothing. In 1863 the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle proclaimed: “A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man… Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and personas heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.”

Dandyism actually finds its origins in the late eighteenth century military wardrobes. In this time period, men’s fashion moved away from frills and lace towards a literal revolutionary style of boots and trousers. As the first tastemaker and pseudofashion designer (think Andy Warhol meets Karl Lagerfeld), Englishman Beau Brummel is credited with inventing the modern suit and pioneering the fitted silhouette. Modern menswear was invented during his time, grounding masculine style in militaristic ideals, rigid participation in tradition, and hierarchical deference to superiors. Brummel believed devoutly in this rigorous participation, believing that “to be really elegant you must not be noticed.” Ironically, it took him hours to get ready each morning: he powdered his nose and adjusted his cravat to perfectly highlight the angles of his face. Brummel’s effortless but self-aware aesthetic caught the public’s attention, and the rest of London followed suit.

Historically, the dandy has been aware of the sartorial gaze of society, and he has often used this creatively position himself as the avant-garde social pioneer. Kate Irvin, curator of costume design at RISD and author of Artist/ Rebel/ Dandy Men of Fashion, wrote: “The dandy bases his own selfconstruction on a studied amplification of certain qualities, such as elegance and restraint, thus throwing themselves into relief and into the spotlight for onlookers.” The term dandy is an amorphous term that has historically changed overtime.

Oscar Wilde purposely presented himself as a caricature of English romanticism, donning a velvet jacket, floppy tie, and knee breeches. Salvador Dali grew a large moustache and often dressed up in costume for public appearance. One of the most iconic dandies was Andy Warhol. Like Brummel, Warhol’s distinct uniform—gray wig, turtleneck, and thick frame glasses—made him an immediately recognizable pop personality. These figures intentionally departed from mainstream masculine fashion convention in order to communicate new forms of self-expression and identity.

Warhol, however, realized the double-edged sword of self-conscious masculine style. He wrote in his diary: “A man caring about how he looks is usually trying very hard to be attractive, but that’s not very attractive in a man.” Clothes are politicized objects: they act as personality maps, sexual clues, and social cues. There have been many satirical attacks on dandyism, attacking the fluidity of class markers like

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the suit and focusing on the absurdity of men’s 'feminine' obsession with clothes. After the trial of Oscar Wilde in the late Victorian period, many dandies were branded as gay and publicly shamed for their external focus. Afterwards, men like Dali and Warhol were considered to be foppish creative types on the fringes of society. +++ The not-so-famous dandies were generally perceived as effeminate, weak, and occasionally gay. In order to build a uniform state, traditional masculine values of toughness and leadership emerged in the rigid time period between the Great Depression and World War II. Growing consumerism focused on the image of the businessman, emphasizing uniformity to communicate class and professionalism. It crushed any sense of individual expression, with the biggest individual choice being the color of your tie or the fold of your collar. With the rise of consumerism, women’s fashion became playful with more choices, while men put their perceived sexuality and masculinity on the line if they dressed outside of mainstream menswear. Historians have termed this trend “the great masculine renunciation.” Men had to seem dispassionate and virile, not vain and stylish.

The mid-twentieth century brought new sartorial trends into the cultural mainstream—for example, moving away from the professional sphere of their parents, youth embraced casual staples such as jeans and T-shirts. But these new uniforms were just that: uniform. It was generally perceived as 'cool' and masculine to to dress homogeneously and ambivalently. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in “Listening to Khakis,” a 1997 essay for The New Yorker, “Men are still abashed about acknowledging that clothing is important.”

Gladewell continues pointing out the absurdity of masculine sartorial opinions of khaki pants “The world may think they are nice, but so long as he doesn't think so he doesn't have to be self conscious about it, and the lack of self conscious is very important to men. Because ‘I don’t care.’ Or ‘Maybe I care, but I can't be seen to care.’ ” Figures like David Bowie, Will Smith in the Fresh Prince, and Curt Cobain challenged rigid masculine style, but like dandies in the past, they remained on the fringes of the cultural mainstream, and their fashion choices were often dismissed as “artistic.”

by Brock Lownes

In 2009 interview with MTV News, Kanye West boldly claimed “Your dress don’t give away whether or not you like a man…. People wanna label me and throw that on me all the time, but I’m so secure with my manhood…” Like Brummel, Kanye West has linked masculine performance with fashion consumption, but he has done so in a way that emphasizes creative expression rather than rigid conformity. And West, unlike Warhold, Wilde, and Dali before him, isn’t seen as an artistic counterpoint to an inflexible mainstream. From skinny joggers to short shorts, collarless button-downs to bomber jackets, men’s fashion is moving past ambivalence and military uniformity towards a period of modern dandyism.

This February at New York City Fashion Week, Kanye West revealed his collaborative clothing line with Adidas Originals. The collection featured multilayered athleticleisurewear paired with his ankle-high yeezy boots. His line is not revolutionary in its aesthetics; rather, by metaphorically and now literally manufacturing his own image, Kanye West has taken the ethos of the dandy and injected it into the cultural mainstream.

Dandyism in the past was about effortless elegance and self-importance. Dandies— fulfilling the aesthetics of Brummel’s standardized menswear—dressed not to be noticed, but to fit in. Then, artists like Wilde, Dali, and Warhol used dandyism to highlight their creative authority and self-expression by positioning themselves outside a defined norm. Now, men are expressing their masculinity by being fashion forward, by being dandies.

Recently, 9,000 of West’s limited edition Adidas Yeezy 750 Boost sneakers went on sale on Valentine’s Day, exclusively in New York, priced at $350 each. Five days later, they could only be found resale for an average of $1,600, a relative bargain compared to the previous West shoe. His $245 shoe collaboration with Nike sold out in 11 minutes, eventually going on resale for a record breaking $15,000.

That’s a lot of khakis.

BROCK LOWNES B'17 is an avant-garde social pioneer.

+++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Dash Elhauge illustration by Blaine Harvey When I was 13, I wrote a piece of malicious software and put it on my mother’s computer. It took the Geek Squad guy three days to fix it.

My mother, as it happened, had decided it’d be a good idea to send me to sleep-away camp in Maine. She said it’d be a good experience for me to learn to make friends in a new social setting (which, God forbid she ever reads this, she was completely right about). I didn’t really care for the idea, and after losing a few shouting matches, went up to my room and started figuring out how to program so I could put malware on her computer. Within a couple of days, it was complete.

It’s design was dastardly. Virtually all operating systems have some designated set of programs that start running when your computer starts up. Your computer’s WiFi, for instance, needs to turn on as soon as you turn on your machine, so you don’t have to keep manually connecting to the Internet. The program that lets you navigate your files starts up to let you view your Desktop. Your computer’s clock ticks so it won’t show the wrong time. All I did was add a script to this set of programs that shutdown my mother’s computer. The result?

Every time my mother started up her computer, my program shut it right back down, rendering it unusable. No wonder it took the Geek Squad guy three days: he couldn’t even start the damn thing up.

Hearing this story, it might be tempting to think that I was a lesser version of one of those tech prodigies we seem to hear so much about: Zuckerberg hacking the Harvard Facebook directory to get pictures for FaceMash; Jonathan James breaking into the US Ministry of Defense servers at 15 to intercept covert government messages. But the reality is that hacking has very little to do with brilliance, and a great deal to do with an obsessive willingness to spend massive quantities of time to subvert figures of authority without physical confrontation. Computer hacking isn’t so much about epiphanies in front of streaming lines of green text, but about endless research and a meticulous hand capable of examining functionality with a fine-toothed comb.

When I started writing the malware for my mother’s computer, I didn’t even know how to program. I had spent a lot of my time learning how computer viruses worked because mine was chock full of them after I got LimeWire. I was desperate enough to fix my computer that I had spent hours bopping around the Internet to learn how they operated. Then, when my mother decided to send me away, I Googled until I got the answers I wanted (“program shutdown computer,” “program run on startup windows,” etc.). I was able to pull this off not because I had intimate knowledge of computers but because I was fueled by an intense, obsessive desire—particularly an eerily methodical form of anger, burning on a low flame. I think this obsessive desire plays a role in the stories of most successful hackers. Kevin Mitnick, at one time the most wanted hacker in the world, described hacking as an “addiction.”

The process of hacking is actually quite a bit like breaking into a house. You could search for a hidden key, pick the lock, or convince someone inside the house to let you in—all of which might work (though searching for a hidden key requires turning over a bunch of rocks undetected, picking a lock demands technical knowhow and special tools, convincing someone to let you in necessitates unthinkable degrees of smoothness), but all of which seem rather elaborate considering you could just walk around the house to see if someone left a low-level window open. Most hacking is precisely that: persistently looking for low-hanging fruit. As the hacker Count Zero put it an interview with PBS, a hacker is someone

MARCH 13 2015

who “if they saw something closed and it was doing something, they just wanted to open it… it’s just a general loose sort of mentality based on… technology.” If you can imagine the sort of person who’d check every door in a hallway to see if one’s unlocked, you’ve got a pretty good grip on what a successful hacker looks like.

I’m not drawing this analogy for kicks. Before I could hack computers I opened my sister’s safe by ear and picked the lock on her diary with a paperclip (I’m not proud of that one). I didn’t take anything from the safe and I read very little of the diary—that’s what most people seem to miss about hacking. Often the desire to hack has very little to do with the desire to gain access to what you’re hacking, and everything to do with the power trip of overcoming a system that you’re not supposed to be able to get into. An “anonymous” teen who hacked the US Ministry of Defense (almost certainly Jonathan James) described hacking to PBS as, “power at your fingertips. You can control all these computers from the government, from the military, from large corporations. And if you know what you’re doing, you can travel through the Internet at your will, with no restrictions. That’s power; it’s a power trip.” What did he do once he got in to the US Ministry of Defense? He wasn’t downloading their information, because “usually it’s pointless, bureaucratic stuff you don’t need to know…” He read their code. For fun.

In high school, a friend and I gained administrative access to a number of school computers by following an online guide, enabling us to install whatever we pleased on them.

We then setup a system through which we could use the Mac speech synthesizer remotely. “Hello there,” we would have the computer tell an unsuspecting user, poorly muffling adolescent guffaws from across the room. “I see you decided to wear blue today, you silly silly boy.” Sometimes we’d take a screenshot of the Desktop of the computers in the library and make it the background, then adjust the computer settings to hide all the icons and taskbar so people would keep clicking the background thinking everything was frozen. Later, while I was at boarding school, I found a hole in the school email server and wrote a script that enabled me to send school-wide emails from whomever I pleased, but never pulled the trigger.

These things do not require tremendous genius, or even really great technical knowhow. Misha Glenny, a British journalist who covers cyber security, once gave a TED talk in which he discussed how a “carder” (someone who buys or sells stolen credit card information) named RedBrigader made hundreds of thousand of dollars a year without understanding the technology he was using. A large class of hackers act in precisely this way. They spend a great deal of time Googling and installing, but never find security holes themselves.

Software like Cain and Abel enables users to monitor entire networks without knowing how they work. I ended up discovering my mother’s email password using this piece of software —though I, like so many hackers, never used the information.

The password was even being sent on the network unencrypted—talk about low-hanging fruit.

In fact these sorts of easy pickings are everywhere. Cain and Abel’s webpage says “the program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort.” Jonathan James reported spending much of his early hacking days telling website administrators about security holes on their systems, only to get into the security systems using the same holes weeks later. If you look at the

Brown Political Review online magazine archives, you’ll notice under the “Latest issues” section something that says, “[downloads query=”category=1 format=”1].” This is Brown Political Review’s server trying to query the database archives to pull up back issues, but inadvertently handing intimate knowledge of how the database works to every user. Hacking can seem mystifying, but maybe that’s just because most people don’t know what an open first story window looks like.

In fact, a lot of the most damaging hacking attacks have very little to do with sophistication and a lot to do with tapping into people that are willing to put in enormous amounts of legwork. Jonathan James distinguished himself from these criminals, saying there are “people that go into corporate web sites, government web sites, and change it.” In fact, he was worried about going to prison because he was going to be surrounded by people that “lack morals.”

So if not monetary gain, what are Jonathan James and other hackers after? What was I after? I think an opportunity to subvert authority. While the rest of the world may see hacking as malicious breaking-and-entering, hackers see it as playful prodding at the stupidity and false assumptions of a tech ignorant society. Last year Anonymous released information about 13,000 accounts, including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Hulu. Why? “For the Lulz,” they said.

There is a sharp distinction between online thieves and hackers. The people who spend their time poking and prodding for security holes are often distinct from the people who take advantage of those holes. Understanding how to stop cyber crime, then, isn’t so much about stopping hackers, but about creating a culture where hackers don’t feel so powerless that they resort to malicious use of their skills. Figuring out how to take down a computer system and feel powerful aren’t inherently conducive to a criminal lifestyle; it just happens to be the case that, the way cyber culture is, criminal activity is the best way to fulfill these desires.

DASH ELHAUGE B’17 is not a hacker handle, so shhhh.

TECHNOLOGY

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THE ARTISTS OF T N E M E S U AM The Providence Laughter Club meets downtown on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month, on the sixth floor of 18 Imperial Place, which is where I sit cross-legged one February evening on one of 15 purple pillows arranged in a circle on the ground. I have never been to Laughter Club before; I’m here because I’m madly curious and was tired of just reading about the practice. Plus, today is the Providence chapter’s third birthday, and the promise of free cake advertised on their Facebook page provided an additional incentive. Because there are a fair number of us who are new to the joy of laughing together, Rebecca Foster, certified laughter life coach and the leader of our group, explains the process. We are here just to laugh, not laugh at or because of or in response to. We are going to say “ha ha ha” or “ho ho ho” even if we don’t feel spontaneous laughter emerging yet. We are going to set an intention to acknowledge the child deep inside us and play.

People keep coming in, half-waving so as not to interrupt, and squeezing themselves into the circle. A tiny woman whose name I don’t catch chuckles behind one hand as she takes a seat. Lynn, draped in a rainbow garment I cannot confidently identify as either shawl, blouse, or Technicolor dreamcoat can’t even finish waving before two of the dozen or so regulars start to titter. “We have some beautiful laughers here tonight,” Rebecca explains, and Lynn blushes with pride.

The circle expands to let the newcomers have some room. “They must have heard I was bringing cake!” Rebecca says.

“HA HA HA,” I say. +++ The founder of Laughter Yoga is a middle-aged doctor from Mumbai named Madan Kataria, who was astounded by the positive effects of laughter he’d read about in medical journals and wanted to find a way to incorporate those benefits into the lives of his patients. Laughter Yoga began in 1995 with five people telling jokes in a Mumbai park. After about 10 days, when the jokes turned vulgar and then ran out, Kataria had to come up with a new plan.

Struck by psychologist and motivational speaker Harry Olson’s idea that “you have to start somewhere, even if it means going through the motions at first,” Kataria revamped his club. He took Olson’s idea back to the park, combining fake group laughter with deep breathing exercises, and his club took off. People were faking laughter by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Kataria claims that there are currently clubs in over 70 countries, each looking to his club for laughter exercise ideas. “The body cannot differentiate between fake and real laughter,” Kataria declares on his official website.

While I cannot find any scientific evidence to support this particular claim, across disciplines there does seem to be significant confirmation of somatic benefits to laughing. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, suggests that an increase in endorphins can result from “the simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha.”

Dunbar conducted experiments in which he found that individual subjects’ pain thresholds increased significantly after they watched videos of comedy groups, whereas “simple good feeling in a group” had no effect. Political journalist Norman Cousins wrote that, while suffering from life-threatening heart disease, “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

Nobody’s going so far as to assert that laughter is the best medicine, but I suspect that at least Kataria quietly believes it. +++

by Sienna Zeilinger illustration by Polina Volfovich

As we make our way around the circle, I grow increasingly distracted by just how many species of laughter there appear to be. In this room alone, there is cackling, hooting, chuckling, tittering. Heads are thrown back, held in hands, shaken from side to side. Legs come unfolded and kick out like a puppy’s. There is shaking, rocking. If the hands move anywhere, it’s to the face, or otherwise they slap the thighs or floor with a violence that gets no less startling with repetition.

When it gets to me, I do my duty, erupting in forced laughter several times. As for real chuckling, though, that’s yet to happen. “My name is Sienna, ha ha ha,” I say, and everyone bubbles over, saving their loudest laughs for last. Rebecca howls. I have the urge to reassure everyone that it’s okay with me if they’d rather just smile or give a nod; I won’t be offended. +++ A complicating factor in the conversation about laughter’s health benefits is that there are always too many variables in any given experiment. Robert R. Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland and author of Laughter: a Scientific Investigation, has failed to find that laughter causes much benefit; he instead concludes that it may be that other environmental factors are responsible for these health effects. “Laughter is social,” he explains, “so any health benefits might really come from being close with friends and family, and not the laughter itself.” And scientists have not been able to create an isolated environment where natural laughter still arises.

Rebecca agrees: the social aspect of laughing is perhaps even more important than the laughter itself. She tells me that as she’s become more involved with the Laughter Yoga community, she’s noticed that the actual act of giggling has taken a backseat. These days, she says, “It’s not so much about laughing. It’s about playing and connecting in ways that we have sort of isolated ourselves from doing.”

Greg Bryant, a laughter expert and professor at UCLA, explains that researchers now think that laughter is the evolutionary product of labored breathing during physical play. There’s a difference between types of laughter, though. Genuine laughs come from “an emotional vocal system,” Bryant says, “whereas fake laughs are produced by a speech system.” Genuine laughter is associated with unmediated intakes of breath. And, researchers take care to note, while humans are far from the only species to genuinely laugh, we’re the only one that ever tries to fake it. +++ We are apparently ready to begin Dancing Like Animals. I have a great deal of questions, all of which could be satisfied by referring to the title of our activity and believing in myself, so I keep my mouth shut and watch Rebecca fold into herself over the iPod dock on the floor.

“Let’s go with… okay, choose one: shark, whale, or barracuda.”

I’ve been obsessed with whales to a conversationally unacceptable degree ever since I first read Moby Dick. As instructed, I wiggle my body to get limber, and the music comes on.

I let my jaw go slack and lumber as slowly as I can across the room, occasionally making my hands into a blowhole above my head and pluming bursts of staccato heh-heh-hehs.

Everyone seems to know what a barracuda sounds like. Tom has fashioned a formidable dorsal fin out of his own big hands and is gazing upon us all from his wide orbit, grinning broadly, uttering a deep and sporadic “ho.” I appraise the scene: 15 adults in a brightly lit room above a near-bankrupt city, emulating, to the best of our ability, the very creatures our seaward window

We are to go around the circle and say our first name, followed by a round of group laughter.

Mercifully, we’re going clockwise, so I’ll speak last. Rebecca demonstrates: “My name is Rebecca—” and then collapses, as in genuflects until her forehead touches the ground, the whole time cackling without reservation. It’s really a cackle, too, punctuated by long E’s and short A’s, and it’s loud, and then she rights herself and it ends, not exactly in a manner that one could call abrupt, but without any of the customary sighing or tapering off into chuckling that would ordinarily follow a bout of laughter like this.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

overlooks, chortling. I really am trying to dance like a whale. I want this to be a liberating moment. But it’s just silly. I can feel my dignity diminishing with every prance, every leap. +++ We laugh as if we are shy, walking with slow, tiny steps, giggling behind our palms. We laugh as if we are congratulating each other. We laugh as if we have just seen each other in the airport for the first time in ages and are greeting each other with full hearts—Yuri and I lock eyes from opposite sides of the room and he takes this as a green light, loping toward me, guffawing, gaining speed, never breaking eye contact, opening his arms wider and wider until he suffocates me in a jubilant hug. It’s well-intentioned, but I’m uncomfortable all the same: we’re occupying the same square foot of space, for one, but we’re also acting as if we mean to uphold some connection when it just isn’t there—we’re not in an airport, we don’t know each other’s last names, we have never seen each other before. There is no love here. His hug feels the same as a hug he’d give if he meant it, but there’s nothing to mean, and I pull away. +++ One reason why we’re lucky to be mammals: to a certain extent, we exist beyond the bounds of our own bodies. To call it empathy is to brush over the biology of the matter. Our limbic systems are so attuned to each other’s that our brain chemistry synchronizes with those we’re closest to. We mirror yawns, hiccups, smiles.

What’s really going on here reflects an intimate interdependence on each other, one that profoundly impacts our emotional development. From day one, we’re wordlessly sensing, shaping, and being influenced by each other, unconsciously making good on our biological pact to teach each other how to be in and of this world.

And it turns out there are deep neurological consequences of missing out on these shared emotionally intimate experiences. If, as an infant, nobody spends time gazing into your eyes, you will grow up guarded and wary of others. If you sleep alone, far from your mother’s heartbeat, it will take you much longer to adopt consistent sleep stages and a strong immune system.

If you are deprived of vocal and physical affection, one alarming study found, you will simply die. +++ To cast off the pursuit of joy as childish is “a disservice to yourself and to the world,” Rebecca tells me when we chat on the phone. The thing is, watching adults pretend to be children is unsettling. I’m on the precipice of adulthood, and I’d like to think it’s possible—unquestionably possible—to experience adult joy. But at Laughter Club, the only way to attain joy is to be a child again. It’s a Sisyphean task no matter how supportive the community, and there’s a terrible sadness in watching them continue to try. Not to mention it’s a strange activity in the first place, deliberately trying to laugh.

Now, though, I find myself thinking back to Rebecca’s initial instructions. “We are going to set an intention,” she said. We are going to play. We are going to laugh.

These people are making the choice to come to Laughter Club, to pay the suggested $2 or $3, to disregard questions of authenticity or realness and simply engage in primal and necessary joy. However childish Laughter Club may be on the surface, I have to admit there’s something edging toward responsible, even mature, about deciding to take control like that: to say, I will access joy, and in so doing, to claim authorship of your own amusement. +++ This quickness to mirror each other’s laughter is a source of comfort when you consider the overwhelming evidence of humans’ tendency toward negativity. Our brains, conditioned by generations of responses to Stone Age stressors, are still more efficient at learning from a negative stimulus than from a positive one of the same emotional charge. Rick Hanson writes about this phenomenon in his book Hardwiring Happiness. This negativity bias, he has said, is “like Velcro for the bad but Teflon for the good. [It] makes us extra stressed, worried, irritated, and blue.”

“So in that sense,” Rebecca explains, “there’s a completely neurologically sound reason for practicing happiness. There’s the importance of correcting for this thing that hasn’t really caught up with our biology. How do you train the brain to actually better serve us? We’re creating a neurological highway toward laughter.” +++ “I went and played with Dr. Kataria in Mexico,” Rebecca says, nonchalantly, and I do a double take. I had no idea she trained with him. She can’t remember when she met him, either.

When asked, she laughs about the concept of time.

In Mexico, there were challenges within Rebecca’s training group: firstly, the participants, citizens of a dozen different countries, couldn’t understand each other. And it was not immediately an atmosphere of positivity. “A lot of people who were there were in the midst of major life challenges. Terminal health issues, or a spouse who committed suicide—crazy, crazy difficult stuff,” she recalls.

But they soon realized that laughter could be their universal language. And with it, they were able to speak. According to Rebecca, it was as if they were saying, “I am not going to meet my life from that place of darkness. I am going to meet it from a different place.” It was a room full of people, she said, making that choice consciously, repeatedly. “And so there was just this really profound sense of, like, wow, this is the world I want to live in.” +++ On the way back home from a swim at the beach with my family one summer night, the engine of our car dies a sudden death—simply gives out, stops going. We pull over, call AAA, and huddle together shivering on the side of RI Route 4 in the waning Friday light. And then, even more abruptly, we stumble, and with our arms around each other, we are falling, tumbling down the grassy hill away from the highway, coming to a halt on our backs, tangled in a sandy heap under the stars. In the moment when we break this silence, we could shout or murmur curses, or mourn our beloved little car, or throw up our hands to the sky, or groan, or shake our heads, or anything—we could do anything. And yet, of course, when the moment actually arrives, there is really nothing to do at all but laugh.

SIENNA ZEILINGER B’15 thought she tittered, but figured out she chortles.

MARCH 13 2015

METRO

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TEA, GHOSTS

At any moment of the day, they say that you’re surrounded by approximately fifteen ghosts. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that around 108 billion people have ever lived on earth, and considering the number of people currently living, it seems the world has assigned you a small bedroom-full of ghosts to occupy your space just as you walk around, or use the toilet, or do all of the uninteresting things you don't want anyone to see you doing.

You might make yourself some tea on a blue Thursday, deep in thought. And your ghost might cup his hands over your ears.

Another might collect dust onto your windowsill. Another could be putting her hand in your mug.

You take a sip of your tea, and can’t believe you left it out for so long. You stick it in the microwave for fifty-seven seconds. You thumb through an article on your phone about how people must learn how to be alone, while turning on a couple of other things.

Now, this number is dependent on time and place. For instance, you would have had twenty-nine ghosts follow you

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by Grace Abe illustration by Eli Neuman-Hammond

in 1968, and even more if you go back. Our population is booming, so our ghost assignments are slowly being stretched thin.

You look at your things, seeing little signals blink, and wait for some sort of enchantment to reach out to you, while fifteen of your closest friends drift by.

So in 2013, when a DJ in west Wales died from his homemade poppy tea, maybe he wasn’t with the right ghost. Maybe the French schoolteacher who died in 1906, the one who survived her own opium-poisoning accident in Fens by the slightest chance, was assigned to another boy.

Maybe the ghost assigned to Paul Dalling instead was also from Fens, but different. Maybe as a child, this ghost had to kiss the faces of his dead relatives when there wasn’t enough to eat. This scared him. It would keep him from eating for days; he would eat little for the rest of his life. This ghost might not have thought so much of Paul, who ate many things before he made his last drink.

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NORWEGIAN MASTERY JOHN SANT

for my love,

MARCH 13 2015

Dreth EPHEMERA □ 12

ON INDIA’S DAUGHTER

by Ria Vaidya & Himani Sood The average news-reader is all too familiar with the atrocity that the documentary India’s Daughter is centered on: the gang rape of a 23-year old physiotherapy student, Jyoti Singh, on a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012. The incident, perhaps because it took place in the nation’s capital or perhaps because of the brutality of the crime, ushered India to the brink of a cultural revolution. A reservoir of female oppression burst through an aging wall of patriarchy—the dam had finally broken.

Close to a week before India’s Daughter was scheduled to air on NDTV, a leading Indian news channel, it was met with a barrage of controversy in India. Feminists problematized the title—how was the documentary challenging patriarchy if it perpetuated the very notion of a woman being defined only in relation to her family? Others criticized the ‘white savior’ mentality owing to its British director, while the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting accused filmmaker Leslee Udwin of capitalizing on the global shaming of what they saw to be a false notion of Indian society. In a gesture adhering to our glorious sanskriti (culture), the government of India chose to prioritize “log kya kahenge?”(what will people say?) over the exposition of the injustices faced by the women—oh, apologies, the flowers, precious gems, and diamonds of India. The documentary was immediately banned and the Delhi Police filed a First Information Report (FIR) against the filmmakers for a multitude of ludicrous reasons: intentional insult with intent to breach of the peace, with intent to cause fear or alarm to the public, with intent to insult the modesty of women, and for the sending of offensive messages through the use of communication services.

With a speediness uncharacteristic of our normally sluggish bureaucracy, the Indian government blocked the broadcast of the documentary in India on March 4, a day after news of it went viral on social media. BBC complied with the court order issued against them, but not before airing the documentary in the UK. On March 5, the Indian government directed YouTube to block access to the video in all countries. YouTube complied with the order.

India’s Daughter exposes viewpoints of people directly and indirectly involved in the Delhi 2012 rape incident. After two years, Jyoti Singh becomes more than a name through the evocative memories of her parents. Jyoti’s alleged friend and tutor Satendra is also featured in the documentary and is currently under scrutiny by the media for possibly having no connection to Jyoti whatsoever. Interviews with the rapists’ defence lawyers, ML Sharma and AP Singh, are also featured, along with several other members of the Indian judicial system. The most controversial aspect of the film is the interview with one of the six men convicted of rape, Mukesh Singh: “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good.”

This comment created an uproar as proponents of the ban were quick to point out that this was simply the mindset of a criminal and deviant from society, and should not have been portrayed as representative of all Indian men.

“The respect and dignity of women, constitutes a core value of our culture and tradition. Our government remains fully committed to ensuring safety and dignity of women,” said Home Minister Rajnath Singh to lawmakers in Parliament. “How was permission given to interview a rapist? It is shocking. I will get this investigated.” Many individuals have been concerned with the ethical and legal implications of showing the interview with convict Mukesh Singh when him and the other convicted rapists are currently appealing their sentences in the Supreme Court. Additionally, the fact that Udwin was able to gain access to Tihar jail, where Mukesh Singh was held, is a subject of scrutiny and her claims of having received permission from the previous ruling government and the prison officials are currently under investigation.

As of now, there has been no news on the progress of the investigation.

The Minister of Parliamentary Affairs M. Venkaiah Naidu said in the same debate in the parliament, “We can ban the documentary in India but there is a conspiracy to defame India.”

While the government concerned itself with conspiracy theories, the rest of the world easily evaded the ban by watching the controversial documentary on peer-to-peer networks and smaller media sharing platforms.

To clarify, in no way does the film condemn Indian culture, nor does it attack the government for its views on women. In fact, Udwin interviews many Indians—including Chief Justice Leila Seth, Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court Gopal Subramaniam, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association Kavita Krishnan, and Delhi Residents Usha Saxena and Shambhavi Saxena—who offer perspectives on the case that stand in sharp contrast to the inflammatory remarks made against women by the rapists’ defense lawyers AP Singh and ML Sharma.

The documentary does not “[intend] to create fear or alarm to the public.” The fear already exists, but it has been silenced because of the status rape occupies in many parts of society. To be raped in India is to be humiliated, dishonored, and considered a walking corpse.

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So what is the purpose of making this documentary two years after the incident took place? Is it a call for peace, a cry for revenge, or simply a show of bemused awareness, incited further through the plentiful stock of news reportage on rape and the controversies surrounding the rights of women, that terrible things happen in our country?

Ria Vaidya B‘16 and Himani Sood B‘15 have been close friends and neighbors since childhood. They were both born and raised in Bangalore, India and have navigated the same social structures present in urban India. Following the debate waging back home, the two draw on their personal realities to examine institutionalized misogyny and the repercussions of going against “Indian culture.” +++ Ria Vaidya: When the Delhi 2012 rape incident occurred and streets were devoured by protests, a common slogan written on signs was “Ashamed to be Indian.” Several of my friends described that same feeling of shame bubbling within themselves while watching BBC’s India’s Daughter. I used to feel it too when I first started to understand the pathetic state of women’s rights in my country.

Himani Sood: An inexplicable shame, that of being a woman in my country, took hold of me as Jyoti Singh’s mother tells us what her daughter’s last words were to her: “Sorry, Mummy. I gave you so much trouble. I am sorry.” Surviving two weeks after having her entrails ruthlessly pulled out of her, with the knowledge that she had sparked off a cultural revolution and had become a symbol of the sexual brutalities faced by women across India, Jyoti was apologizing for being a woman. I realized that there existed a pervasive collective mindset towards the status of women in India: we were barely human.

But this revelation did not come to me only after watching the film. The daily reportage on rape, the sleazy smiles and whistles, and the awful groping lost in a sea of hands were everyday reminders that my body wasn’t welcome in the public sphere. These experiences are what make seemingly casual shots—like, for instance, a still of a group of men staring at the camera and grinning slyly—so triggering.

“Don’t wear skirts if you’re taking the bus.”

“Ask a guy to buy booze for you. Don’t draw any unwanted attention to yourself.”

“You cannot change the way men think.”

—and we complied because, you know, “boys will be boys.” Our slouched shoulders and low-hung heads were bodily reflections of the self-shaming to which we women had unquestioningly succumbed.

Ria: This attitude towards women, which is so widespread in India, was the inspiration for a national rape culture awareness campaign in India called No Country for Women, which I co-founded in March 2014 with a fellow Brown sophomore, Shreena Thakore B’16. The first article written about the campaign, published on an online platform for Indian entrepreneurs, was meant to be titled “Two Brown University Students Combat Rape Culture in India”. The intern that posted the article online got into trouble with her superiors, who asked her to change the title of the article. “Rape culture in India?” they wrote to the intern, “Please change that, rape is not our culture!”

Himani: Of course it’s not! How could we have dared to disturb the sanctity of our divine sanskriti? But not everyone viewed India’s culture in this same way. Liberals, radicals, and those “corrupted by the west” did not believe in such an antiquated understanding of the term “culture” and the suspiciously contrived version of our culture. So a clash of cultures ensued and, all of a sudden, culture was a discrete choice that we as individuals had to make.

There were two contenders: the India that identified centuries of conditioned patriarchy as the leading cause of sexual crimes against women, and Bharat, understood as rural India, that blamed the imbuement of western ideals and the increased availability of chow mein as some of the reasons behind rape.

In no way am I suggesting that sanskar (tradition) and modernity are incompatible in India. This binary was constructed by Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the right-wing party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and self-appointed guardian of Indian culture, who in the aftermath of the Delhi rape incident proclaimed with much conviction that “... Bharat becomes ‘India’ with the influence of western culture…”

Men are not the only ones perpetuating patriarchy; speaking on the banning of “sexy mannequins,” in India, female politician Ritu Tawade of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ideological child of RSS, condones the movement with some well-informed logic. “Lingerie mannequins promote rapes. Skimpily clad mannequins can pollute young minds. After the Delhi rape case, I felt something had to be done. It’s a Western thing; our culture doesn’t

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

allow sexy mannequins.”

the rapists are so far removed from us, the good people who don’t rape anyone.

Ria: Ugh. Culture. No Country for Women’s most vocal critics are the ones who fiercely defend Indian culture (whatever that term is supposed to mean).

Rape is not because of our culture, it’s because of Western culture.

Indian culture is rich.

It’s not ‘misogyny’, it’s just our culture dictating how women should behave, and how dare they go against our culture?

Wearing short skirts is not against the law but it is against our culture so someone needs to teach girls a lesson.

In a country of 1.3 billion people, how can one claim that we coexist as a single homogenous culture? What is this culture, what are the rules, and who is the authority? India, the land of romanticized plurality, of alleged tolerance, of contradictions, cannot be blanketed under a single static “culture.” Confusion surrounding the term “Indian culture” is apparent in India’s Daughter, where the rapists’ defense lawyers call Jyoti Singh’s decision to go to the movies with a male friend in the evening “premarital activities” that signify her departure from “Indian culture.” According to these lawyers, her actions warrant rape. In the film, one of them said that if his daughter were to do the same thing, they would “pour petrol on her and set her on fire” for breaking away from tradition. Meanwhile Leila Seth, former Chief Justice, who is also very much Indian, refers to Jyoti’s actions that night as “absolutely normal behavior.” These contradicting interpretations of women’s rights and “Indian culture”are held by two individuals of the same socioeconomic status and same generation, working in the same metropolitan setting, and, in fact, even working in the same judicial system.

Rape culture itself can be seen to have emerged, in part, out of a vehement defense of the supposedly singular, pure “Indian culture.” While the girl out with the boy in the evening is singled out as going “against Indian culture,” the men raping the woman is never described as “against Indian culture.” Setting one’s daughter on fire in a farmhouse becomes lawyer AP Singh’s creative way to maintain “Indian culture.” Clearly, the defenders of this real, pure Indian culture apparently can and will use violence—sexual or otherwise—to maintain the status of the Indian culture. The various cultures and societies that currently exist in India and which offer (relatively more) freedom to women—such as the society that I was raised in—go against the idea of a pure “Indian culture.”

Himani: Not to be pained by the heinous statements being made, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish the root of the problem—these would be the reactions of one with an ample reservoir of stoicism. But with the knowledge of a suffering that looms large, compassion becomes a very volatile emotion and the film brings about a feeling of helplessness and cynicism, a sense of faithlessness in humanity. Eventually, viewers find it easier to choose sympathy over rage because it appeals to the more innocuous side of human nature—the side not responsible for one’s suffering. This could be related to the incessant news reportage on the subject, which although is used for the reiteration of the extent of this suffering and injustice, can turn into a form of information overload and will then be rendered redundant. At that point, our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we fail to hold the reality of the situation in mind. We, the members of the educated class, constituting the main viewership of the documentary, are not amoral people.

And yet, the hysteria that gripped the nation met a painfully slow avail in the contrived tangle of bureaucratic hypocrisy that stood for democratic ideals. +++ The government’s decision to ban India’s Daughter only instigated further international and national interest in the documentary. In a progressive move, Indian media giant NDTV protested against the ban of the documentary by running an image of a flickering diya (lamp) with the words “India’s daughters” for the full hour during which the documentary was supposed to be televised on its news channel. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is implementing a gender sensitization program in its curriculum for students and teachers. Campaigns like Kiss of Love are fighting against the moral policing that lands people in jail for showing affection in public. People are engaging in discourse about misogyny and gender-based violence on social media as well as within households and schools. India is in the midst of a rapid cultural revolution. Even though we are so far away from home we can still feel its strength, and we are proud to be actively taking part in it.

Himani: A new image of the “Protector” has been conceived in urban India, where a man is allowed to go drinking, clubbing, and is able to indulge in sexual pleasures, but a woman he is affiliated with usually by familial relationship—cannot do the same because of the image revolving around rape. The image that revolves around this is one of rape being a random incident that takes place in dark and isolated places such as alleyways. Thus, women are discouraged from going out alone or after ‘prescribed hours,’ which further perpetrates patriarchal norms by telling women what they should or shouldn’t do. If a woman is seen out and wearing ‘indecent clothing’ or consuming alcohol, she is seen as unrespectable and unprotected—no father figure or brother or any other dominant male figure exists in her life to condition her to how she should behave. Or, the dominant male figure in her life is weak and immoral himself, something that has been passed down to the woman. The woman’s body, then, is seen as being more sexually accessible without consequence because of the absence of protection—this dominant male figure—in her life. The truth that must be acknowledged is that perpetrators are people we know, whether directly or indirectly, and that they exist within our community.

Ria: I would like to think that every Indian feeling ashamed after watching India’s Daughter is analyzing their feelings of shame. I would like to think that this emotional response is an indication that people are starting to understand the social and cultural roots of violence against women. My analysis of my shame led to the understanding that these rapists were raised in the same society as me; I am in some way responsible for them; everyday, I maintain the very social structure in which rape is prevalent and pervasive.

However, it’s not easy to dwell on the shame, to try to dissect it. Shame quickly turns into rage, especially due to the urgency that people feel every time another rape case is highlighted in the news. Throughout the documentary one can hear the exasperation in the cries of protestors, their voices cracking as they shout “Long live women’s rights!” The majority of the Indian population holds an automatic “hang the rapist” attitude towards rape incidents in India. You will often find people describing rapists as animals or perverts, and their shining solution to the problem of rape is to simply hang the rapists. Burn them alive. Castrate them. Drag them through the streets. They are an anomaly, they are sick. While somewhere in the backs of our minds there might be an understanding that misogyny is deeply entrenched in our society and involves all of us, it is eclipsed by the easy-to-digest rhetoric that

march 13 2015

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MARCH 13 2015

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□ 16

YOU HAVE MET HER Or someone like her.

She is drinking tequila from a ceramic shot glass shaped like a cow. One of the housemates is from Wisconsin so the vessel has pale pink udders and the state name written across the animal’s gut. Leaning over the kitchen sink, she salutes two semi-strangers and quaffs, extracting lime juice between pinched lips. Music pipes in from the hallway, and she is impressed by the ease with which she is able to seem at ease.

Before then, she did not swallow her alcohol in one burning mouthful. This time, she is even able to stifle coughs as her throat throbs with liquor and citrus.

Swigs and minutes later, the semi-strangers from the kitchen scatter and she begins ambling through rooms, clutching lampstands and the shoulder blades of partygoers now crowding the colonial home meant for a young family of four. She finds somewhere to sit; she is the type of girl who rests her feet at these types of parties.

She is grabbing her knees, the stem of an empty wine glass on the table in front of her. And this is the point at which the quavering girl is discovered by the boy who she wished to be found by.

For a long time, they spoke mostly about the weather and their hometowns—hers on one coast, his on the other. This talk about birthplaces always brought them back to the weather: the anodyne climate of sun on his and the bitter winters that blunt knuckles on hers.

Once, conversation about weather became conversation about water. She was from the side where men on schooners with seines harvested haddock for 400 years. “My grandfather’s grandfather worked on commercial ships.” She was surprised to hear herself sharing ancestry. But, she liked telling him that because facts, idiosyncratic ones, felt like small puzzle pieces to be assembled in the pursuit of intimacy. Her perception of playing the game was quite quaint.

He was from the side of the country where ocean was not just an industry, but a mood. It was never far away, flanking a highway and always stinging noses with the scent of calcareous shells, even when inland.

For a long time, she didn’t care about his freckles. When exactly they became calf-brown constellations that she wanted to trace with an index finger she was not sure. But in an insidious, slow manner fondness made itself known. The turning point was indecipherable, but there was eventual recognition that an invisible line had been crossed. Because soon she was counting things on him: the holes in his sweaters, the number of front teeth flashed when he smiles. Soon, they talked about everything, dreams-and-fears sort of dialogue, while boiling potatoes or before turning the page of a book. +++ He laughs feebly, “Why are you over here alone?”

“I feel sick.” She wants his concern for her to escalate. Now isn’t that dumb, she thinks. He looks half-committed to her company, eyes not yet affixed on her face, but leaping just beyond her. But she still wants him to stay.

Now isn’t that dumb.

She collapses into the hunch between his chest and collar.

Precariousness requires touch. She knows this. He rearranges the loose hair around her ear. He rests palms on her back as she starts to slouch supine, canine across his lap.

Later, at his apartment, she peeks into his closet while he is fetching Advil

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and rinsing a mug. From his room, she hears the soft muffle of the faucet sniveling and his cutlery jangling—the noises indigenous to this dwelling, to which she now has gained access. The shirts are hung, but not buttoned. Even in his absence she begins to become more aware of his size. Are his shoulders broad with muscle or is he stretching out fabric with plastic hangers?

His room is spare, musky, ligneous. There is an empty instrument case, flute-sized, hinged open on the floor.

She clambers onto the bed, the disheveled sheets, which women her age have already forced off with their feet. By doing so, she feels herself transform into a mannequin. A small, ridiculous mannequin to be whirled around.

He enters with antidotes in both hands. “You still have that headache, huh?” She nods, whispering, “Your place is nice.” She scans the room. No one else is home, but, for her, whispering is sensual, fluttering; the butterflies of breath.

It draws attention to the shape of lips; its faintness draws another nearer to the almost open mouth.

They talk about a trip he took to Texas because of a postcard on his desk.

There is a Steinbeck reference, another fragment fastened; there is his hand, adolescent and roving, rising up her leg.

Their sex is not acrobatic or remarkable, but it leaves them heaving and grinning by the end. Soon he grows drowsy from it; she is jolted awake because of it and starts counting the thuds of the heating unit. She tallies his mid-slumber twitches.

Why does she sense that the puzzle is being put back in the box, that the box is being put back on the shelf?

In the morning she wakes, looking at his mussed head buried in the heap of pillows; she folds the laundry on his floor— a domestic impulse that she hoped would endear her to him—and walks out. This seems like the right thing to do.

From then on, her interactions with him will be heavy with inordinate intention, reckoning. Sometimes he will wave and halt to speak with her on sidewalks. They will discuss the weather only in terms of temperature and forecasts.

Frequently, he will avert her with sharp lefts onto other streets at a hurried pace. Discontent, she will storm off to the closest public bathroom. In the stall, she will peel off her nails and flush them down the toilet. It hurts her raw, pink hands to unlatch the doorknob. To recuperate from this masochism, she will order the molasses cookie she likes from the diner she likes. It does not help.

Occasionally, he texts, perhaps about a new Peruvian restaurant in her neighborhood or a song lyric about children climbing cannons. Sometimes, usually just before she sleeps, he will say something hypothetical, like that he is picturing what it would be like to share a studio with high ceilings and white brick walls for a summer while he is clerking.

She responds with something about the heat and wearing very little clothes. He doesn’t reply, for hours, for days, until it is irreversibly unrequited. This pricks her with despair.

When she is with him at a coffee shop, he picks up an incoming call. The man reading a newspaper next to them glances over stiffly with irritation. She also finds it vexing. Not merely because it’s rude to fill a hushed, cavernous space with speech. She stares into the cave of her cup, but the eyes are blank, immobilized. She is really listening to the voice on the phone that is elfin and crackling with coughing or laughter.

by Lili Rosenkranz illustration by Caroline Brewer She hopes it’s a bad cold, not glee. She wonders, why do I dislike other women and keep cursing the existence of them?

She begins consulting mutual friends who warn her that the most evil men are likely the personable ones that have nice teeth and plans to become public defenders.

“He doesn’t care about you that way,” one cautioned. “I heard he took another girl on a ski trip in New Hampshire.”

While the friend sputters axioms of alarm, she just glowers into the mirror, surprised by how tired and round her features appear. She will do this often, glance at reflective surfaces, car windows or glass doors, and wonder, is this puffy, sad face mine?

In a concrete stairwell he will clasp onto her hipbones and she will giggle a little-girl-with-a-lollypop giggle that she anticipated would be more mellowed, enchanting. Laughter is hard to refine when nervous.

She will invite him to a benefit that her parents host in a ballroom because she learns he is in town that weekend. He will attend in a wool suit with chalk stripes. They will dance without shoes and befriend the bartenders who gift them a bottle of Red Stag.

A day later, he will flinch when she goes to stroke the feathery hairs of his forearm.

This is the point at which she starts hating everything that is not what she wants: the other girls who wear gingham and cinch jeans around smaller waists; the other boys who would probably call with more regularity. On a date, other boys would want to split the charcuterie plate and ask questions to determine her interests.

She had become the girl who internalized the fluctuating coldness and affection of a man. In her, he had created the callous feeling that accompanies the realization that she can no longer remain indifferent when he winks or plays woodwind music on stages.

At the next party, he is barricaded by a bevy of boys and girls. Marooned, she will want to cry or retch when she sees him leave without approaching her. She will want to cry or retch because his departure, his treading off decidedly in a different direction, has inspired this excessive, silly aching. +++

One day, when she is so fed up with her bleeding fingers and bloated cheeks, she calls and ruefully asks if they can meet.

Skeptical, he concedes. They are back in his bedroom, and the roiled sensation in her stomach urges her to reveal to him that her heart has been hijacked. When she finally cries, he gains power by not. He lets her sob, bursting into tears on his breast. “I am sorry. I don’t know what is wrong with me.” Maybe, at first, he likes embracing someone smaller than him or is pleased that he has caused her vibrations, the composition of staccato gasps, which are lodged between her ribs. Swiftly, though, he becomes bored. “Don’t worry. It's alright.” His words are not barbed; they are authentic even.

He puts his arms around her because he understands that precariousness requires touch. Not much more is muttered.

But that seems alright.

There is no point when the girl completely grasps that incompatibility must be tolerated, not reformed. But, sometimes she will like the sweet cookie or a song on the radio or her waistline. Sometimes she will long to be needed.

Sometimes they will see each other, accidentally. He will make a comment about how pleasant and warm it is outside.

“Yes,” she answers. “It is.”

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Contest ) Day Pie-Eating Providence Pi(e irits // Sp & e ffe Co rvest 7:30 PM // New Ha // $10 Street, Providence 130 Westminster to enter behind ere’s a pie racket Just to be clear, th e Pi e bl ion. The Hum this whole operat ugie bo & us io lic ors of de Company, purvey ke sta the city, has a big pies throughout e’ll be a er Th .

14 ch ar M in a small pun on and t at New Harvest, pie eating contes ers rm Fa e m rti te e Win another one at th bents en the day. Both ev Market earlier in , fit ro np no sign, a local e efit Downcity De lik o wh le op pe achs of and also the stom pie.

nt 7PM // Granoff Ce // free reet, Providence St ll ge An 4 15 Arts, inues vato festival cont The Cinema Ritro diand Angst, both with The Miracle cently re d Rossellini an rected by Roberto Fola. gn lo Bo neteca of restored at the Ci e nn za Su r so es of Pr m, lowing the progra sa er nv will host a co Stewart-Steinberg n lia Ita in ip sh d censor tion on gender an r pu Nu , pa Pa na di Giar cinema with Elisa sheba Okwenje.

Mathur, and Bath

Soups Class

166 Easy Entertaining, 6PM // The Cafe at // ce en id ing 10, Prov Valley Street, Build $29 90). ister at 401-437-60 Soup for you. (Reg

La Donuts Center, 1 7:30 PM // Dunkin 0 15 8$3 // idence Salle Square, Prov Charlie r Meryl Davis and Do you remembe e ones Th ? cs pi ar’s Olym White from last ye mco r pe su d an y scar that were vaguely ys wa in really graceful petitive and then be ’ll ey Th ? ng ingly stirri that were surpris . ice on g in nc rs, da here, among othe reet, 6 Westminster St 10PM // Aurora, 27 r ve 903 // No co Providence, RI 02 again. spins again. And DJ Nick Hallstrom And again.

Jenny Hval Perfume Genius,s Theatre, 270 Broadbu 9PM // The Colum ce), ence // $15 (advan way Street, Provid $17 (day-of )

aking for the Artisan Cheese-M Home Cook blic Library, 1464

nd Pu 6PM // Cumberla // free w/ ad, Cumberland Ro ll Hi d on am Di reservation at 401crackers. (Register Don’t forget the 333-2552).

ight Bike Newport Nster Bar, 345 Thames

um Hadreas’s third alb Too Bright, Mike ll. It’s fa t las t ou us, came as Perfume Geni y, dr lla ba e ns te in e of 33 minute cascad nco y ting and deftl intimate and haun a uses her voice as al Hv y nective. Jenn on d an e, ur xt te uous bright and mellifl collaboration with a , ice Vo of s he Mes t recent rød and her mos Susanna Wallum ions sit po m co ns her release, she softe at the r te ea th irs sta up to a murmur. The ate tim in a fitting and Columbus will be ing. venue for the even

Oy 6PM // Midtown ey free I think but th // t or wp Ne , et Stre money clearly want your

o: Four Recently Cinema Ritrovat Shorts Restored Chaplin for the Creative

nter 7PM // Granoff Ce // free reet, Providence St ll ge Arts, 154 An t is udies departmen Brown’s Italian St restored d an re ram of ra sponsoring a prog logna the Cineteca of Bo films on loan from Auto d Ki aplin’s shorts— in Italy. Four of Ch miIm e Th d an sy Street, ll Race, The Rink, Ea we as , m ra og pr onday’s by grant—are on M m fil t dy of Work,” a shor , as “Chaplin, a Bo ck De ew dr atrix Chu, An Tarek Shoukri, Be ster. and McKenna Web

a bike towards building All donations go od, fo and there’ll be path in Newport, g. cin ra ke bi d indoor music, raffles, an

h 22 Sunday, Marc

culty Biennial Closing: RISD Fa rth Main Street,

No RISD Museum, 20 3 // $12 for adults, 90 02 RI , ce en Provid of afstaff, and faculty free for students, filiate institutions

h 20 Friday, Marc

ilharmonic Rhode Island Ph Open Rehearsal emorial Auditorium,

ch 17 Tuesday, Mar

Mathematics of Public Lecture: Cooking mon Auditorium, Salo 0 PM // DeCiccio 6:3 iversity // free Center, Brown Un

sor of a Harvard Profes Michael Brenner, , will be ics ys Ph d Applied Applied Math an & Wales dner, a Johnson joined by Mark La sto, Po l New York’s De alum and chef at ical at m he at m n on the for a conversatio ing ak m be ’ll ey Th ing. principles of cook alm sh ar blowing up m fresh ricotta and lows. Sweet.

e: A Myriad Media Collectiv

Raqs Marginalia

rade St. Patrick’s Day Pa The logo for the ) rg e.o ad ar yp da ricks (providencestpat — go lo tta ‘98, and their looks straight ou ne yli sk ce e Providen a silhouette of th atchur-leaf clover—m fo a e sid nested in r lo lighter-green co es the green and s, ou uc de will be ra scheme. The para ry virescent. ve d an , ry celebrato

rch 19 Thursday, Ma

h 16 Monday, Marc

Stars on Ice

at th noon // starting e fre // e us Ho State

mia Collective are co Delhi’s Raqs Med ency, sid half-semester re ing to RISD for a SD RI to se ur hing a co and they’ll be teac ’ll ey Th . ay M of d the en students through of ea id nts around the be working stude scribe the annotator or t”— the “marginalis xt, te ain m e th unter to who can write co that ys eum’s website sa and the RISD Mus th wi ct ra te uraged to in “visitors are enco ussc di ss cla e th attend r the materials and we ents held in the Lo sions and other ev d. go right ahea Farago Gallery.” So

ns M 5:30 PM // Vetera 02903 ts, Providence, RI Ar e th of 1 Avenue // $15 aninoff. , Weill, and Rachm Works by Dvorak price.

All at below retail

m

rch 14 Saturday, Ma

o: The Miracle Cinema Ritrovat and Angst e er for the Creativ

Parade St. Patrick’s Day e Rhode Island

y@gmail.co

is Jewtell if somebody You can generally ilding bu e th to r ey refe ish by whether th as gell and Brown at the corner of An ies l.” The article impl lle “Hillel” or “the Hi a of ch an br e it’s just on knowledge that ches an br th wi n, tio niza much larger orga tryd campuses coun an es iti un m m co in bat ab Sh a sts e, Hillel ho wide. Politics asid liaay (all religious affi Dinner every Frid u can yo ay e) and this Frid ’s tions are welcom dy In e th t ou checking eat challah while l’s lle Hi in lay sp di ntly on art exhibit, curre . ry galle

Public Access

arch 18 Wednesday, M

theind ir to: L i s t locks of ha rers, send Secret admi

S I L E H T S I L E H T S I HE L

r the t day on display fo Sunday is the las a few nt we I biennial. work at the faculty psto d en m m co ly re days ago and high en ev St e animations by ping by to see th d an o de Vi n/ /Animatio sSubotnick of Film du In by um in m into alu a still life etched trial Design’s Kate Blacklock.

ecade of Punk in Salad Days: A D Washington, DC eum // 59 Main eenwich Od 8PM // Gr nwich // $12 Street, East Gree

to see drive to Greenwich Is it punk rock to u. yo to DC punk? Up a documentary on

in Blossoms Sugar Ray and Gr Road, Lincoln // $40

h 23 Monday, Marc

Actor Steven Irish Voices with Collins , 41 ce Public Library

en 7PM // East Provid e Providence // fre st Ea , Grove Avenue sh acnot a lesson on Iri (Disappointingly) Keats, on re llins will lectu cents, Steven Co rt.

Joyce, and McCou

RIve 7PM // 100 Twin and up

15.

1996 comes to 20

rch 21 Saturday, Ma otters Harlem Globetr ts Center, 1 La Salle nu 6PM // Dunkin Do // $35 and up ce en id ov Square, Pr

al confused the actu I’ve still probably in n io ct pi de th their Globetrotters wi e travel ich they solve tim wh in a, m Futura ey’ll Th ic. shy arithmet paradoxes with fla 21st, e th on ll g basketba simply be playin zle, az -d le zz ra th wi ball but it’ll be basket e. flair, and panach

Jay Leno Live ce Performing Arts en ce 7:30 PM // Provid et Street, Providen ss Center, 220 Weybo up d an 5 // $4

t, so iled on this even Leno originally ba e same th r fo ien Br O’ n na PPAC booked Co ind, m s hi no changed date. But then Le g Leno in br to t bu choice and PPAC had no k. ody looks like a jer back. Now everyb

ch 24 Tuesday, Mar

, e weather is good I got nothing. If th d an e sid If not, stay in go for a bike ride. mope.

arch 25 Wednesday, M

mals Wine and Defenders of Ani Cheese Event sion, 1351 Cranston an 6PM // Sprague M $25 // n sto Street, Cran

eir eating some of th Defend animals by 140 ll Ca . ng sion setti products in a man e ar ich wh , ns io rvat 461-1922 for rese d. ire qu re

rch 26 Thursday, Ma Woodcock WalkBird Sanctuary, 583

an 6:30 PM // Norm 0 , Middletown // $1 ad Ro Third Beach odslide show on wo This is an indoor walk.” e tiv re an “interp cocks, followed by Caw!

: Independents This week in News will e or ap ent Sing nd August. pe de In e Th rthday this bi nd co se s celebrate it