The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 9

the college hill independent Volume 32

•

a Brown/RISD weekly

April 22, 2016

•

Issue 09

the

NEWS 02

03

Week in American Exceptionalism Joshua Bronk, Madeleine Matsui, & Will Tavlin

Volume 32 No. 9

State Violence in Turkey Ilgin Korugan & Erin West

METRO 05

A Family Portrait Isabel DeBré

07

¡Sí Se Puede!

Emma Phillips

ARTS 11 15

From the editors:

Sims Past and Present Will Weatherly

lie down in a dark room for hours with a wet towel on your face whatever, these are the end times anyways

Soft Served Ryan Rosenberg

FEATURES 08

Love Letter Archives 2.0 Ben Berke

13

Immoral Punishment Isabelle Doyle

-MM

SCIENCE 16 17

Mind Your Food Anna Xu Sugar, Spice, &...Science?

Eve Zelickson

LITERARY 10

A Vested Interest in the Past Ava Zeichner

EPHEMERA 09

Comradeship India Ennenga

X 18

Sweat ‘N Low Nicole Cochary

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

Interviews Elias Bresnick Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian Metabolics Sam Samore Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Alec Mapes-Fraces Rick Salamé

Staff Writers Ben Berke Jack Brook Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg Will Tavlin Staff Illustrators Frans van Hoek Gabriel Matesanz Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Web Charlie Windolf

Cover Jade Donaldson

Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee

Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

Special Projects Yousef Hilmy Maya Sorabjee Henry Staley MVP Kimberley Meilun

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

theindy.org

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

by Joshua Bronk, Madeleine Matsui, & Will Tavlin illustration by Frans van Hoek

Rock the Vote In what is perhaps the most unexpected political power couple to emerge in 2016, failed Republican and Democratic presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Martin O’Malley announced last week that they might start a band. Speaking to ABC News after a joint press conference on the presidential race, O’Malley told reporters, “We were talking on the walk over here … about tunes we could probably do together—so we’re working on that.” Democrats and Republicans might be stuck in perennial gridlock, but the former Arkansas and Maryland governors are out to kick down barriers (with twelve-inch black leather boots) and rebuild partisanship (with a kickass set of hammers or something). “If Martin O’Malley and Mike Huckabee can get together on the same stage and come to harmony, that would be historic,” Huckabee told ABC. “It could be massive, we could sell tickets to that, and we’re both looking for something to do.” It’s punk rock to the core, but should we even be surprised? True fans of the politicians know their early, unpolished but artistically innovative work: Huckabee in his classic rock and slow jam cover band, Capitol Offense and O’Malley in his face melting Celtic rock group O’Malley’s March.

Huckabee’s rock and roll roots run deep, according to www.runner.convio.net—a Huckabee information resource paid for by the Huckabee for President Exploratory Committee, Inc. “Young Mike Huckabee played and practiced until his fingers were raw and tender,” the site notes. “But by the time he had turned 12, he was playing well enough to join the first of several rock-and-roll bands.” Huckabee’s fingerbleeding days continue with his four-string electric bass and rag-tag group of Arkansas buddies that make up Capitol Offense. The band has appeared on bills with the likes of Willie Nelson, Percy Sledge, .38 Special, Grand Funk Railroad, and REO Speedwagon.

Not one to be outdone, O’Malley began his Irish music project in 1979 as The Shannon Tide with his Gonzaga High School football coach, Danny Costello. After O’Malley’s graduation, The Shannon Tide’s inevitable breakup, and years of gigging solo, the former governor founded O’Malley’s March in 1988 and has maintained an on-and-off presence ever since. But O’Malley’s recent presidential failure means good news for his screaming, underwear-throwing teenage fans: O’Malley’s March is kicking back into gear and touring semi-regularly. “It’s great to be playing with [O’Malley] again,” bandmate Jared Denhard told Annapolis’ Capital Gazette. “We didn’t do anything without him.”

The stars are aligning, and the Huckabee/O’Malley crossover just might rival that of Axl Rose’s recent addition to AC/DC. It’s a classic tale of industry and success: after an exhaustive few years of touring, sexual awakenings, drugs, and experimenting with Kraut Rock, it’s likely that Huckabee and O’Malley will split over unresolvable creative differences— Huckabee writes the songs but O’Malley gets the glory (he’s better looking after all). Perhaps, after years of unsuccessful solo ventures and tabloid controversies, they will even book a reunion tour. Following a long tradition of rock stars entering the political sphere, the duo might use their cultural capital for political good. Maybe, just maybe, in an all but inevitable twist of fate, they’ll make a run for president. Again.

White Face to White Paper Rachel Dolezal is back at it again, this time with a book deal.

Dolezal, who achieved infamy last year with her unsuccessful proclamation of Blackness, is now publishing a book about her thoughts on race, culture, and ethnicity. Since being forcibly outed as white, she lost her role as president of her local NAACP chapter and her professorship at Eastern Washington University. Simultaneously, she gained notoriety through the quick circulation of social media, including twitter hashtags such as #blackfished, a portmanteau of catfish and black, suggesting the insidious implications to Dolezal’s racial bait and switch.

Grasping at relevance, and perhaps cash, Dolezal revealed on the Today Show that she signed a contract with BenBella Books, a small publishing firm. In the uprooting of her normal life resulting from the revelation that her parents are indeed white, Dolezal may have found that BenBella’s modest advance (their typical offer is between five and ten thousand, plus royalties) was better than nothing. Dolezal is writing the book to fill in the margins for those who don’t fit into traditional racial or ethnic categories, something she claims to have been studying for a long time.

That being said, autoethnography does not a theory of race make. And while Dolezal is highly capable of regurgitating Toni Morrison—quipping “race didn’t create racism, but racism created race,” as a defense for her own ethno-racial evolution—that clearly doesn’t pay the bills alone. Not when perms (or wigs?), tanning salons, and bronzer rack up such a high cost.

In her exclusive interview, Dolezal asked provocative questions like “Is there one human race?” and “Why do we still want to go back to that worldview of separate races?” On the Internet, eyes rolled. The Root released an article titled “105 Real Black Women More Deserving of Book Deals Than Fake Black Woman Rachel Dolezal.” Vanity Fair called her the “identity-crisis poster child.” Vocativ, holding nothing back, wrote “the woman who once self-identified as black is now self-identifying as an author.”

Can Rachel Dolezal catch a break? Maybe she doesn’t deserve one: her critics ask how a woman who taught classes like “The Black Woman’s Struggle” could fail to recognize the absurd privilege in her own race-bending. But regardless of what everyone else—perhaps literally, everyone else—thinks, Dolezal is sure about who she is. She may have been born white, but she identifies as Black.

If you’re still confused, her book comes out next March, and she has a TED Talk going online soon.

-WT

-JB

April 22, 2016

God N’ Guns On a desk featuring a holstered gun atop a Bible, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed into law a bill that will allow guns in churches. Surrounded by clapping, smiling legislators, the 64th Governor of the Magnolia State proudly authorized the Church Protection Act. On April 15, 2016, the same day he signed the legislation, Bryant sent out a triumphant tweet: “Churches deserve protection from those who would harm worshippers. That’s why I signed HB 786.” An accompanying Facebook post declared: “Today I signed House Bill 786 to give churches the right to protect themselves from those who would harm them while they worship. I’m a strong supporter of 2nd Amendment rights and will continue to advocate for your right to keep and bear arms.”

The act authorizes church members to undergo firearms training so they can carry guns into places of worship and provide security for their congregations. It’s unclear whether mosques, synagogues, and non-Christian places of worship are included in the act. The act also loosens gun permit requirements and allows people to carry holstered weapons inside churches without a permit. It is already legal under Mississippi law to carry a loaded, hidden handgun in purses, handbags, satchels, and briefcases without a license. What better way to ensure churchgoers’ safety than by recklessly allowing people to carry hidden and loaded guns in a public setting, without a permit?

Baptist pastor and State Representative Andy Gipson wrote the bill, which he says was drafted as a response to the massacre at a church in Charleston last year. Rep. Gipson commented on the need for small congregations to defend themselves against attackers. He also celebrated Governor Bryant’s decision on twitter by retweeting the NRA: “Victory in Mississippi! Governor Phil Bryant Signs #NRA-Backed Permitless Carry Bill Into Law!” Deep in the Bible Belt where guns are commonplace, Mississippi is not alone in enacting the Church Protection Act. NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter announced that the law makes Mississippi the ninth state with such a law. Other states that have passed unrestricted concealed carry laws include Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Despite the NRA-backed hoopla, putting guns in untrained hands is sure to only exacerbate gun violence. In the name of defense, churches have been made less safe from these deadly weapons. Thank God for Mississippi!

-MM

NEWS

02

WE ARE NOT PARIS State Violence in Turkey On January 10, 2016, over 1,128 Turkish and foreign academics, including Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk as well as US scholars Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, signed a collective statement titled “We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime.” This petition calls what is currently happening in Turkey a “deliberate and planned massacre.”

According to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, over 310 civilians have been killed due to actions the Turkish state has taken against its Kurdish population.

Most sources place the start of the insurgency against Turkey’s Kurds on August 16, 2015 when the Turkish government declared a curfew in Muş, a majority Kurdish city, after an alleged attack from the Kurdish guerilla force, The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). A cascade of curfews and other restrictions followed in nearly every major Kurdish city. The restrictions in Muş lasted 20 hours but curfews in the cities of Sur, Cizre, and Silopi lasted over 100 days. In these places, an around-the-clock curfew came with travel bans, power cuts, and interruptions of communication including removal of internet and phone services. In many areas, these restrictions have led to widespread hunger, and have led activists to accuse the Turkish state of intentionally starving Kurdish communities. “We Will Not be Party to This Crime” offers such a condemnation: “The Turkish state has effectively condemned its citizens in Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silopi, and many other towns and neighborhoods in the Kurdish provinces to hunger through its use of curfews that have been ongoing for weeks. It has attacked these settlements with heavy weapons and equipment that would only be mobilized in wartime.”

Turkish military forces have entered Kurdish cities with stunning brutality, carrying out shell bombing and lighting fire to vast numbers of buildings, as well as using heavy artillery and snipers to target “insurgents.” While the Turkish government claims to be targeting terrorists, the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey counts as many as 72 children, 62 women, and 29 people over the age of 60 among the 310 civilians killed. It also notes that 180 of these murders occurred while the victims were within the walls of their own home. These numbers, while shocking, are understood to be vast underestimations due to the lack of basic services and communication within the targeted areas as well as minimal judicial proceedings being taken up to address these crimes. Precise numbers of “terrorists” or “insurgents” killed in comparison to the civilian deaths are largely unclear or unavailable, but it is difficult to imagine that any number of “justified” killings could excuse the over 300 innocent lives lost. Through this mass violence and isolation of Kurdish communities from the rest of the country, the Turkish state is waging an ethnic war against its own citizens.

Kurds, an ethnic minority in Turkey that comprises roughly a quarter of the population, have a long history of facing oppression from the Turkish state. Beginning with the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the nationalization project of the young Turkish government included homogenizing the population, and therefore necessitating erasure of the Kurdish identity. A year after the proclamation of the Republic, Turkish leader Atatürk passed a law that stated: “the people of Turkey are called “Turks” regardless of religious or racial differences.”

This erasure of the Kurdish identity included, among many measures, persecution if one was caught speaking the Kurdish language. Selahattin Demirtaş, who leads the pro-Kurdish parliamentary party explained to the New York Times in an op-ed on March 13 that, “When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, we were not allowed to speak Kurdish, speak about speaking Kurdish or even sing in Kurdish.

I became a human rights lawyer in part because my older brother went to jail for trying to do grassroots activism — just organizing peaceful demonstrations under a political party was enough to get him labeled a terrorist.” In 1984, after years of enduring such forms of marginalization, and after the government had continuously denied the Kurdish people’s request to have the right to education and legal defense in Kurdish (among many other demands) the PKK declared war on the Turkish state.

In the years following the formation of the PKK, the Marxist-Leninist guerilla organization has used varying tactics to make claims for recognition and independence, some of which have been violent. The PKK is an armed movement whose activities over the past 40 years include the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Strasbourg, France and the establishment of military training camps in the mountains between Turkey and Iraq. Turkish political parties have often manipulated the portrayals of such activities in order to engender fear within the Turkish population and gain political power. Most often, PKK actions and other Kurdish

03

NEWS

organizing (including non-violence) have been framed as a threat to the unity of the country and allowed Turkish leaders to garner votes, especially from the western, lessKurdish half of the country.

Today, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is engaging in this same rhetoric to hold on to his and his party’s near-authoritarian power within the Turkish government. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won a majority of Turkey’s parliamentary seats for the past 13 years. During this time, Erdoğan has expanded his powers so extensively that many within Turkey and without now consider him akin to a dictator. In 2010, he proposed a referendum in which the parliament would be granted the power to choose members for the Constitutional Court. This made the Constitutional Court less democratic by giving Erdoğan leverage within the judicial system. This would enable him to escape legal accountability in the following years. As of 2015, Erdoğan has been negotiating a constitutional change with party leaders that would shift Turkey from a parliamentary system with both a president and prime minister to an exclusively presidential system. With a supermajority in parliament, he and his party could pass this change and grant him even more unchecked power than he currently has.

Largely in reaction to this attempt, Turkish voters rallied around the pro-Kurdish, left-wing political party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which had historically received minimal support and gained no seats in the Turkish parliament. This surge in votes during the June 2015 parliamentary election allowed HDP to claim enough seats to upset AKP’s supermajority, and therefore block a constitutional change.

Unsurprisingly to most, Erdoğan called for a re-election on November 1, 2015, which resulted in a loss of seats for HDP, and another majority win for AKP. Most Turkish analysts see the current violence against Kurds as Erdoğan’s direct response to their challenge to his power. Demirtaş, who co-chairs HDP, stated in the same op-ed that, “there is no doubt about what motivates Mr. Erdoğan’s continuing military campaign. He is stoking nationalist sentiment with an eye to a possible referendum this summer that would expand his constitutional powers.” In order to gain votes (and especially take them away from HDP) Erdoğan’s current actions in the east of Turkey work to frame Kurds as terrorists, and capitalize on existing ethnic tensions by rekindling the Kurdish-Turkish conflict.

Gaining these constitutional powers comes at a cost: Erdoğan is blatantly disregarding international law, and committing massive human rights abuses including curfews that deny basic liberty and mass violence that kills the innocent— and no one is stopping him. Although the Turkish state’s violence against the Kurdish minority has gained attention in left-wing news sources, it has received little mass media visibility. Accounts of violence against Kurds in Turkey have been slow to surface in part because the Turkish state has worked to actively repress reporting.

Police forces are shutting down anti-government protests, and jailing journalists reporting on Kurdish populations in the east (they also arrested many of the academics who signed the “We Will Not Be Party” petition). As part of a widespread crackdown on the press, Turkish government forces recently raided and seized control of a large anti-Erdoğan independent paper, Zaman.

In addition to direct censorship by the Turkish state, violence against the Kurds has also been met with silence as a result of Western bias in mass media coverage towards Turkey in general. The unequal attention to tragedy in Western and nonWestern cities has been highlighted by the intense media (and social media) outrage after recent ISIS attacks in major European cities.

The College Hill Independent

by Ilgin Korugan and Erin West

The most attention violence in Turkey has yet received was coverage of a bomb that detonated in Ankara, Turkey’s capital city, on March 13, 2016, killing 37. Still, it paled in comparison to coverage of bombings in Brussels, for instance. Many noticed this discrepancy and called attention to the bias on social media:

While much of the social media attention to violence in Turkey denounced Western bias within mass media, some of this backlash in fact worked to further perpetuate Western bias.

“You were Charlie, you were Paris. Will you be Ankara?” was the title of an exceedingly popular Facebook post written by James Taylor, an Englishman who lives in Ankara. While appearing to have a promisingly critical title, the post argues that, “Contrary to what many people think, Turkey is not the Middle East,” in fact it is just like any other European city. “Just imagine it happening in London,” he asks of the reader. Taylor also notes that Turkey should be thought of as distinct from other majority Muslim countries because it has characteristics, like an advanced bus system, similar to a Western city.

Ironically, Taylor and others—including Turkish users—who spread this post or repeated this general idea in so many other articles and comments, perpetuated the same Western bias they aimed to challenge. In reframing Turkish cities as European, their framework requires a life to be Western in order to be valued. Following the lack of international concern displayed for tragedies in Ankara, Beirut, Lahore, and locations that have been even further ignored, there must be cries for responsibility within media coverage. However, pleas for solidarity and empathy must be rejected if humanization is equated with Westernization. Contrary to Taylor’s claims, Turkey is, in fact, part of the Middle East—many Turks identify as non-Western and non-European. Not regardless of, but with regard to these characteristics, violence in Turkey deserves just as much attention as violence anywhere. A life does not have to be Western, a body does not have to be white, a city does not have to be European to have value or visibility.

Furthermore, within a Eurocentric framework, it becomes impossible to value any part of Turkey other than large, partly Westernized cities such as Istanbul and Ankara. Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, with its now demolished mosques, emptied old city streets strewn with debris, and other remnants of recent state violence, does not look like Paris. Considering the minimal coverage of the tragedy in Ankara, can Turkey’s Kurdish population have any confidence in the international community to raise alarms over their oppression?

In addition, it’s worth noting that while the Ankara incident was claimed to be terrorist violence, the massacre in eastern Turkey is being carried out by the state. In the eyes of most media, this affords such violence a certain amount of legitimacy—a myth that would be rectified if the media lens were directed as it should be: towards those most on the margins. This includes, as of now and with no end in sight, Turkey’s Kurds.

ILGIN KORUGAN B’18 and ERIN WEST B’18 don’t pray often.

April 22, 2016

NEWS

04

REFUGE IN PROVIDENCE

by Isabel DeBré illustration by Celeste Matsui

“In Damascus, everyone lived together, squeezed on the same small block,” Mohammed Ali Al Namis tells me. He, his wife, and children are the third and most recent Syrian refugee family to come to Rhode Island. We are sitting in their new North Providence apartment, 5,500 miles from their hometown.

I follow his wistful gaze out the window: shingled houses and trees sprouting belated blossoms. Some boys toss a soccer ball in the park across the street, yelling to each other in Spanish. “Things are different now.” Just as this New England neighborhood must feel so far away to them, being with the Al Namis family makes me feel remote from the cantankerous politics surrounding the massive refugee crisis transforming the fabric of our global society. Given my fledgling Arabic, I’m also grateful for my interpreter, who joins me to make the conversation possible.

Mohammed goes on: “Cousins, brothers, sisters, friends scattered everywhere.” He looks to his wife, Mayassa, whose white hijab frames her warm, open face. They take turns calling out countries: “Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq…”

But not all of their family is together. “Our daughter—” Mayassa looks down for several seconds. After fleeing the war, their eldest daughter ended up in Lebanon with her husband and children. They were supposed to reunite— borders were open then—but with the growing influx of Syrian refugees, visa restrictions tightened, and prices soared. Given the barriers to entry, they worry she will never be able to join them in Providence.

Mohammed sighs, rubs his salt-and-pepper stubble. He seems tired—his eyes are sunken and dark, voice raspy—but he livens up as four small children emerge from the hallway. “Thank God for these ones,” he says. They say their names and ages in Arabic one at a time, waving shyly and glancing at their mother for encouragement. Mohammed, 9, Geda, 7, Tookah, 7, Jennah, 6.

The fifteen-year-old, Alaa, follows confidently behind, dressed in the same silk hijab as her mother. All too aware of my limited Arabic abilities, she introduces herself with the little English she knows. Then comes the oldest son Ahmed, 20, handsome with a quiff of wavy black hair and ironic smile. Before long, they fall into chatter with each other, collapsing onto the couch to let their father do the talking.

“Many of course, are still stuck in Syria,” he says, meaning other friends and relatives who weren’t as lucky as his family. “Some dead but some alive.”

Their apartment is sparse, without much more than a new-looking leather couch and wooden coffee table. Dorcas International Institute, Rhode Island’s main resettlement agency, procured the place based on its cleanliness and proximity to the organization. Volunteers decorated the apartment and stocked the fridge before the family’s midnight arrival on March 14. When we met, the family had been here only 20 days.

My journey to the Al Namises’ new home began with a Google alert on February 11: it said that the first Syrian refugee family had just arrived in the city, and that a few more were on the way. Having previously worked with refugees in Providence, I reached out to the Refugee Dream Center, an organization supporting resettlement, and learned that Mohammed and his family wanted to share their story. +++ The family first fled to Egypt in 2012—before most of their relatives, before millions of fellow Syrians, before devastating stories had surged to front-page news and the photo of Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach went viral.

At that point, the war was killing tens of thousands but not hundreds of thousands and didn’t elicit the same outpouring of Western liberal sympathy as it now seems to.

“When the protests started happening, all the young people were so excited they thought they could bring the whole system down in three or four months,” Mohammed says. “But we, the older generation, know that this government does not give in. As Syrians say, ‘the blood will reach the knees.’”

The family’s personal experience of violence started when Bashar al-Assad’s army overwhelmed their Free Syrian Army-held hometown of Kadem, marking every resident a rebel sympathizer. If they were to pass through any one of the area’s many checkpoints, security forces would arrest them—which likely meant detainment and torture. The Al Namises moved ten times within the Damascus area, fleeing every time bombs struck their homes. As relatives disappeared, Mohammed knew his family would not survive if they stayed. “Even if we went to Egypt and slept on the streets, it would be better than what we faced at home,” he says.

“What was the final straw for you?” I ask. “The moment you knew you had to leave right away?”

My interpreter tells me that he does not want to translate that question.

He is Syrian himself and, through Dorcas, has become acquainted with the family over the past weeks. Mohammed motions for him to proceed. But when

05

METRO

the translator asks my question, Mohammed looks stricken. In the uncomfortable silence, I realize that although the Al Namis family has decided to tell their story, some things remain too painful to be shared. +++ None of the Al Namises speak English, but the routine of Dorcas’ ESL classes should begin in a week. Jobs and school haven’t begun yet either. So far, they’ve spent their days in cultural orientation classes, which introduce them to the basics of how to navigate their new lives (RIPTA, doctors’ appointments, check writing, grocery stores). When I ask them what they think of America and Providence so far, they all say the country has exceeded their expectations. “Everything is nice, everything is fine.” I realize that their holding pattern has kept them in a suspended reality. Mohammed expresses how happy he is with the political freedoms of America, the laws that hold the government accountable, the police that “won’t pick you apart in the street.” I find myself swept up in his optimism, this sense of hope, however illusory, that our country can be a place of mobility and possibility. He is blessed, he says, that here his kids will have a chance. “You have to understand where we’re coming from.”

Mohammed’s euphoria at having been admitted to the United States is particularly understandable given the odds. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), of the 20 million Syrians applying for resettlement across the world, less than 1% are officially placed. Of the 4.5 million being resettled, less than 0.06% are let into the United States. The Al Namises are eight of the 2,290 Syrian refugees in America, and eight of the 22 in Rhode Island. As David Miliband, director of the International Rescue Committee, said in a recent New York Times Magazine feature, “It’s extremely difficult to get into the United States as a refugee—the odds of winning the Powerball are probably better.”

Of course, Syrians face extra examination, especially in light of the recent terrorist attacks that have closed neighboring borders, hardened Europe’s stance on refugees, and inspired Donald Trump to call for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. The Al Namises arrived just a week before the Brussels bombings, which motivated conservative lawmakers, like Rhode Island’s own Robert Nardolillo, to ask Obama to halt the immigration of refugees to the U.S. In the midst of toxic national rhetoric, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo was initially silent on the question of accepting Syrians, which spoke volumes. State Representative Aaron Regunberg told me, “She announced, ‘Rhode Island will not refuse to cooperate with the federal government’—which wasn’t the warmest welcome. After the Connecticut governor won a Courage Award for his generosity, Raimondo finally got her act together and said she’d support resettlement.”

As governors called for moratoriums, Mohammed and Mayassa made their way to Egypt, where they filed for refugee status and struggled to find work and pay rent. The family remained “on hold,” in limbo for 10 months, waiting for notification from UNHCR. It was an excruciating period to endure, but the shortest of anyone they know, with the average wait time around three years.

During those months, they were called for interview after interview—each one lasting at least four hours, two months apart. “We had no idea what was happening behind closed doors, who was evaluating us, or where we stood in the process,” Mohammed says. He wasn’t aware that the National Counterterrorism Center, the F.B.I., the Department of Defense, the Department of State, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and several other intelligence agencies were screening his family. He didn’t know that he was undergoing the Enhanced Syrian Review, which hones in on fraud as well as refugees’ allegiances to various rebels groups. Caseworkers are trained to detect lies, and eliminate war criminals and potential terrorists. As Brandon Lozeau, Community Relations Manager at Dorcas International Institute told me, “This is the most rigorous process any traveler could face. No one eager to create destruction would willingly go through it.

The questions Mohammed and Mayassa faced spanned their entire lives, from childhood to adulthood—When did you leave Syria? Why did you leave Syria? What did you do there? Do you have any diseases? Are you affiliated with Nazis? Communists? Terrorists? Prostitutes? According to Mohammed, the interviewers paid particular attention to their experiences of the war, especially since he had served in the army (a requirement of all Syrian men not enrolled in college). This made him anxious—people with military ties often face challenges achieving asylum. He says that “the most awful, most bizarre question” for him was why he couldn’t go back to Syria, when the answer felt so brutally obvious: “There is nothing to go back to.” +++

The College Hill Independent

During the raids, government forces stripped the family’s entire house, taking their doors, faucets, outlets, floors. Mohammed sweeps his hand across the empty room. “Then, they took our most precious thing—” He pauses and I picture his house in Damascus, eviscerated and hollow—“Our son.” Mayassa excuses herself, muttering about tea. Their son Ahmed darkens. The interpreter shoots me a look, clearly shocked that the unspeakable has been spoken. Later, in the car, he elaborates: Samier Al Namis, their eldest son, had served in the army before the war, but deserted when Assad’s forces turned on rebels and civilians. Soon after, a rooftop sniper shot him dead one morning in the Kadem street.

That had been their final straw. +++ One morning in Cairo, the Al Namises received a call: they could come to America. They jumped at the chance, leaving, as Mohammed says, “with just the clothes on our backs.” Mohammed and Mayassa rejoiced at the thought of their children’s future. “The whole point of America is to go to school,” says Ahmed, the eldest, who never finished high school in Syria. Once they complete their medical tests (a process which can take over two months), they will enroll. Ahmed plans to get his GED and take it from there. “This is a new chapter.”

When I ask Mohammed what he hopes for himself and his family here, he says, “Whatever comes through, we’re willing to do.” The interpreter interjects that since Mohammed had a trucking license back home, the Syrian community at Dorcas is planning for him to drive large trucks in Providence. Eventually, Mohammed hopes to start a restaurant like the one he used to own in Syria.

“Like East Side Pockets,” he says, already acquainted with the Syrian owners of the popular Providence spot. From the moment the Al Namises descended the escalators at T.F. Green Airport and encountered Syrian immigrants and volunteers cheering with gifts and signs, they have felt the warmth of the Arab community in Rhode Island: Syrian immigrants have hosted welcome gatherings, introduced them to fellow refugees, and rallied to help them with their job search and rent money.

The UNHCR chooses families with spotless records based on how well they fit with needs of the host country’s intake centers, like Dorcas, which connect refugees with resettlement agencies. The intake centers, such as the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, select cities like Providence because jobs are (relatively) accessible and costs of living are (relatively) low. Providence is an appealing destination for other reasons too, including its diversity—14% of Rhode Islanders are foreign born. According to the U.S. Census, Rhode Island has the highest per-capita population of people with Syrian ancestry of any state.

Dorcas International Institute is guiding the Al Namises through daily life, providing the family with necessities—housing, doctors, home-cooked falafel—and connecting them with resources like language classes, employment training, and school. Despite the support system, Syrian refugees still face many challenges: many can’t speak the language, which bars them from most work and mental health services. They need degrees, credentials, and certifications to enter the workforce, and it’s unlikely they will gain access to the same positions they had in their home countries. Children have difficulty integrating into public schools. Trauma impacts daily life. Poverty disproportionately affects Providence’s refugee and immigrant communities. And then there’s discrimination. The state is no stranger to Islamophobia: Rhode Island’s Muslim school was vandalized in a hate crime last year. “Luckily, the voices of those supporting and welcoming Syrian refugees are much louder,” Lozeau from Dorcas said, citing a recent State House rally where hundreds of community activists, clergy,

April 22, 2016

and students drowned out the voices of anti-immigrant state representatives with calls of, “Say it loud, say it clear! Refugees are welcome here!” +++ Mayassa emerges from the kitchen with a tray of sweet black tea. Outside it’s suddenly dark—the moon hangs too low to offer any light. “Do you think you’ll ever return to Syria?” I ask.

“We miss everything,” Mayassa says. “Syria was beautiful.” She corrects herself: “Syria is beautiful.”

“We have memories. We have people we left behind who we want to see again...” Mohammed trails off, remembering. “But our kids don’t. Half of their lives, especially the young ones, was war. If somehow the regime ends and life resumes, my wife and I may go back.” He looks at his six children across the table. “But they will be Americans.”

ISABEL DEBRÉ B’18 hopes for open borders.

METRO

06

DECRIMINALIZE DRIVING Bill H-7610 and the Fight for Undocumented Rights

by Emma Phillips

On March 25, the Rhode Island State House rattled. The halls, lined with portraits of the state’s sternest founding fathers, echoed with a resounding call. ¡Licencias para todos!

(Licenses for all!) ¡Ahora es tiempo!

(Now is the time!)

El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

(The people united will never be defeated!) ¿Qué queremos? ¡Licencias! ¿Cuándo? ¡Ahora!

(What do we want? Licenses! When do we want them?

Now!) ¡Sí se puede!

(Yes we can!)

They translate to a demand for dignity. Predominantly Latinx, established community organizers were joined by students, young workers, and even a couple of kids who scampered through the halls alternating between playing tag and holding their crayoned signs high. Legislators slammed their doors as voices rang out. After speaker of the house Nicholas Mattielo’s secretary sealed off the main entrance to his office, protestors laughed as they watched him exit surreptitiously through a side door. Unfazed by the subtle dismissal, they set their sights higher, on Governor Raimondo, and with renewed resolve marched to her third floor office door. The rally, organized by Comité en Acción, a Providence based community group dedicated to advancing immigrant rights and fighting racism, was one of four held at the state house in March alone. Activists implored legislators to pass Bill H-7610, a proposal that would allow undocumented immigrants to attain legal driving privileges.

Rodrigo Pimentel—the Secretary of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats and the Communications Director of the Young Democrats of Rhode Island—was one of more than 50 people marching that afternoon. The child of immigrants and a Deferred Action recipient, they testified for the passage of the bill and are still in the process of pressuring legislators.

Pimentel gets to the heart of the issue quickly: “A license gives one a sense of being, and of humanity. It allows a person to be fully integrated in their community. Their life is no longer defined by an erratic bus schedule.” +++ It isn’t the first time a bill of this kind has come before the House Judiciary Committee. The original iteration was presented in 2006. Every time, it has failed.

In this political environment, legislators in favor of the bill have had to make some compromises, shifting the content to make it more appealing to its opponents. Senator Frank A. Ciccone, the Democratic representative for the predominantly Hispanic District 7 and a sponsor of the bill, talks about it as an assuredly pragmatic politician. Even over the phone, it’s clear he also maintains a hint of restrained, institutional optimism: “We’ve changed the wording to make it more palatable.”

When he says more palatable, what he means is more restrictive. The new iteration of the bill includes more stringent clauses than any of its predecessors. It mandates that eligibility be limited only to those who have begun the

07

METRO

application for U.S. citizenship. There is a $595 fee to even file the now necessary naturalization application, making the stipulation prohibitively expensive for many. Ciccone laments, “my opponents say they’re illegal, we shouldn’t give them anything.” He claims that “they are hard working taxpayers, they’re here, they’re driving, they should have the ability to get insurance.” This line about hard working taxpayers is a classic in the immigration debate, a moralizing capitalist value judgment that posits humans as only worthy if they are active cogs within the market economy.

Nationally, 12 states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) and Washington, DC have afforded driving privileges in the form of state-sanctioned identification cards to undocumented immigrants. It is not an unprecedented action, and one that Rhode Island would do well to follow. Pimentel points out, though, that Rhode Island’s bill already has extremely strict parameters of eligibility, much more stringent than neighboring Connecticut’s requirements. In addition to being engaged in the citizenship application process, applicants must be able to prove they have filed income taxes for at least the past two years.

Pimentel goes on to say, “Legislators have suggested that we should do public opinion polling on this issue, which I find absolutely outrageous. We should not have to poll basic human decency.”

Providence’s immigrant rights groups mobilized in unison to push for passage of the bill. Comité en Acción, Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition, and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association presented a strong united front, but their efforts were not uncontested. Rhode Islanders for Immigrant Law Enforcement is not only dedicated to the defeat of the bill, but advocates for the passage of an alternative, more dehumanizing one. H-7860, or the “Public Safety and Protection Act,” seeks to erase Rhode Island’s status as a sanctuary state—one that does not engage intimately and intensely with federal immigration authorities—and increase state cooperation with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. This also begs the question of what public the state is seeking to protect.

In an interview with Terry Gorman, the president of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, he declared he is “dead set against licenses for illegal aliens, have been since 2006.” A small business owner from Cumberland, Rhode Island, he and his cohort are dedicated to ensuring that immigrants don’t “come to this country and live here and work here and basically take advantage.” Pimentel’s father defies this tired imagining of the freeloading immigrant.

Pimentel shares, “My dad, as a self-employed mason and contractor, is a taxpayer, business owner, but does not have a license—all because he overstayed his visa almost two decades ago.” He’s a small business owner just like Gordan, but without any of the same privileges.

Without citizenship status, immigrants are already grossly limited in what services they have access to, driver’s licenses just being one. Subsidized housing applications request a social security number, as do driver’s license applications; and undocumented people who either intentionally or accidentally misrepresent their status risk deportation. Notably, a driver’s privilege card would allow those without a social security number to access insurance. This would make their presence on the roadways legal, reducing the likelihood that Customs Enforcement (ICE) would become involved if they were to be stopped by the police.

Unfortunately, the fear and vitriol that drives Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement to block immigrants from securing driving privileges does not exist in a vacuum. They have the support of Representative Doreen Costa, the co-chair of the committee hearing the bill. She calls the Public Safety and Protection Act, which would also seek to bar Gina Raimondo from issuing an executive order allowing driving privileges, a good bill. Her colleague Representative Robert Nardolillo is not only close with Gorman, but goes so far as to employ the rhetoric of the Federation for American Immigration Reform—a group connected to the Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement and white supremacists—in his arguments against H-7610. +++ While Bill H-7610 is no panacea, it is on the table. It would not radically overhaul an immigration system that perpetuates the notion that humans only have value, and thus only deserve rights, when they are providing labor. But working within the auspices of the current political system, it is a start. The bill has not failed yet. It has been held for further study. Although beset by a legislative tactic meant to derail momentum, this is not the end for Bill H-7610. Comité en Acción is imploring community members to flood the office of Speaker Mattielo with phone calls voicing support for the bill and to provide signatures demanding the legislation be recommended for passage.

EMMA PHILLIPS B’17 called Speaker Mattielo’s office at (401) 222-2466 and signed the MoveOn.org petition by searching Pass Bill H-7610.

The College Hill Independent

AS NEVER,

Collecting Literary Correspondence in the Internet Age

“There’s been a recent boom in letter books,” Carol DeBoerLangworthy tells me over a stack of writers’ correspondences she’s fished from her bookshelf for me. DeBoer-Langworthy, or CDBL as she refers to herself in her email sign-offs, is a Professor of English at Brown University, where she teaches a course that takes advantage of this boom: “Special Delivery: Letters and Diaries.”

In the literary tradition, the term ‘letter book’ describes a bound collection of mail sent by a particular writer. It’s common practice for publishers, at the end of a writer’s career, to cull their most eloquent and scandalous missives into a retrospective volume. A quick Google search (“selected letters review”) yields five New York Times reviews of such books within the last three years: Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Elia Kazan—and that’s just from the first page of results. Many of these letters can also be accessed in libraries with literary collections. Archivists organize a writer’s letters, manuscripts, unfinished drafts, and other ephemera and make them available to researchers.

Letter books and collections almost exclusively showcase the letters of long-deceased authors. This is somewhat unsurprising—more time elapsed means more time to garner prestige and academic intrigue. Furthermore, dead writers and their correspondents can’t veto the publication of their personal documents. But prestige and discretion are not the only reasons publishers and archivists shy away from collecting more contemporary correspondences—there are plenty of recently deceased authors whose correspondences would be enormously popular. A crucial difference in the treatment of contemporary correspondences stems from the fact that most of them transpired via digital media. Paper letters can be presented more easily in books and archives than the digital cloud left behind in emails, texts, tweets, and Facebook messages.

If correspondences are to remain an important resource in literary scholarship, publishing houses and libraries must adapt to digital communication. There is a finite amount of culturally significant paper mail left to publish, but huge swaths of correspondence await in the digital realm. The question is, what changes when the paper trail goes digital? +++ The digitization of correspondence raises a number of practical questions about how libraries and publishing houses will organize new types of files. Most institutions with literary collections have established methodologies for organizing physical letters. However, most libraries also lack precedents on how to acquire and present correspondences that never made it onto paper.

At a recent meeting with a writer whose name they would not disclose, Brown University’s John Hay Library acquired a writer’s hard drive for the first time. The files on the hard drive were of academic interest, but archivists at the Hay couldn’t immediately add them to the collection because the digital files didn’t fit into their existing framework of organizing writerly ephemera. The files needed a call number. There needed to be a way to look up them up in Josiah, Brown University’s online library catalog. Listing the hard drive under one title might have obscured the valuable contents inside of it from would-be researchers, so the archivists simply printed out every file on the hard drive and cataloged them like normal manuscripts.

Jennifer Betts, an archivist at the Hay, is quick to admit that this is not a sustainable strategy. The Hay has yet to devise a new system for archiving and providing access to digital files. Finding a way to collect and present email correspondences is a part of this task, though the Hay has not yet attempted to add a writer’s email inbox to their collection.

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the papers of hundreds of legendary writers (Goethe, James Joyce, Edith Wharton, to name a few), is also devising new systems to integrate digital files into their collection. Gabby Redwine, a Digital Archivist at the Beinecke, says that the library recently acquired the laptop of Tony Geiss, a screenwriter and songwriter for Sesame Street who died in 2011. To make the files accessible in a format that’s true to the environment they were created in, the Beinecke built a virtual desktop that allows researchers to click through files exactly as they were saved and organized on Geiss’ laptop. His emails, however, remain inaccessible to the public.

A few leading libraries have added email inboxes to their digital collections. The University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center offers access to David Foster Wallace’s email account, and the UCLA Library has made Susan Sontag’s emails accessible via laptop in their Special Collections room. Given

April 22, 2016

the two writers’ gargantuan status in contemporary literature, the treatment of their emails seems more a testament to their renown than a harbinger of the future of literary correspondence. Email collections are still a long way away for most libraries.

On the publishing side, creating the modern analog of a letter book gets complicated when communication is fractured across different media. Even gaining access to a writer’s email account wouldn’t provide the comprehensive source of correspondence that a writer’s letters once provided.

A publisher might also have to sift through text messages and various social media inboxes. Then, after the correspondence is collected, the publisher must find a way to coherently organize various media. +++ In addition to organizational logistics, collecting digital correspondence arouses new ethical dilemmas. In the paper mode, a writer’s letters can be acquired in one of two ways: arranging an exchange of that writer’s letters before they die, or purchasing the letters from their recipients and the executor of the writer’s estate posthumously.

Imagine the case of a famous writer who corresponds mostly through digital media. Their correspondence might be inaccessible if the writer did not bequeath a series of passwords. In such a case, the only way to access their correspondence would be to hack into their accounts. This may seem alarming, but, assuming permission by the executor of the writer’s estate, it’s on similar moral ground to the established practice of busting into a writer’s letter chest posthumously.

The only difference would be that, in the digital case, the sent and received messages reside in one inbox. With a paper trail, a publisher or archivist must track down the writer’s side of the correspondence from the names and addresses on the letters he or she received.

Digital or not, publishing a writer’s personal files without direct permission has always been morally dubious. In the past, publishers and archivists circumvented this dilemma by receiving approval from the owners of the physical letters.

Digital correspondences, on the other hand, have far more owners and access points than their paper analogs. Every digital correspondence is owned in its entirety by both communicators. Furthermore, some social media companies own all the content sent through their website. If two famous writers shared a lengthy Facebook correspondence, would Facebook be able to sell the rights to it?

If a digital correspondence lingers unpublished for any of the mentioned reasons, there may be greater incentives for those outside the academy-publisher complex to enter the market. Hackers have frequently released the private emails of celebrities and politicians, and an illegal leak of a famous writer’s correspondence would likely garner widespread public attention. While this may quench the public’s thirst for literary correspondence, academics may abstain from citing illegally published correspondences in books and papers. +++

by Ben Berke illustration by Juan Tang Hon

In 2015, the publishing house Semiotext(e) broke ground in compiling a book of emails sent between writers Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. The emails were written entirely between 1995 and 1996, after Acker left Wark’s native Australia, where they shared a brief romantic fling. The emails are passionate and hastily written, full of swears, ellipses, and creative uses of keyboard symbols. There are morning-after apologies for passionate tirades. The period of reflection afforded to writers who stamped and mailed their letters is noticeably absent from Acker and Wark’s correspondence.

In the book’s introduction, the artist-critic Matias Viegener writes, “If paper letters were best suited for love, perhaps email does best with crushes.” Viegner accurately captures the fleeting and youthful elements of Wark and Acker’s email correspondence. But he also belittles their feelings and the medium in general. Viegener’s quote denies email users the depth and seriousness of older generations of letter writers. And if letter correspondences play an integral part in the canonization of older writers, how will email correspondences affect the way readers and academics perceive younger writers?

Viegener is not off the mark in pointing out that letters and emails have inherent differences. Emails can be sent in rapid succession, allowing for faster conversation and perhaps encouraging less care and reflection from the writer. Perhaps it will be harder to take contemporary writers as seriously if their correspondence is more tossed-off. However, emails will inevitably contain the personal details that readers and academics search for in letter books. Perhaps these details will be less guarded than they are in carefully worded letters, enabling deeper and more accurate scholarship. This is certainly the case in Acker and Wark’s correspondence. CDBL, the English Professor who kindly lent me a selection of her letter books, told me that she thinks many published correspondences are contrived. CDBL is currently writing a biography of Neith Boyce, a writer whom she suspects cultivated a deliberately publishable correspondence with her writer husband. CDBL also told me that this is not exceptionally egotistical behavior for a pair of famous writers.

For collectors and readers of literary correspondence, the advent of digital communication has instigated a swell of practical, ethical, and scholarly dilemmas. A fabulous wealth of digital correspondences remains largely untouched, and while libraries are devising new systems to organize digital manuscripts and communication, the publishing industry has yet to capitalize. Recent and highly public breaches of email data have demonstrated that a writer’s digital correspondence is accessible from many angles. The question remains, how and when will it be utilized?

BEN BERKE B’16 eagerly awaits The Selected Emails of Susan Sontag.

FEATURES

08

A Vested Interest in the Past

By Ava Zeichner

My emo boyfriend’s sleeves were too long. W

e were 12. He loved me I think Everything was gray, in an alley, coca cola bottle, um and girl dancing around and around and a homeless feeding tons of pig eons a go at the 7-11 wore skinny jeans as a he the kid of my dreams, like, a sucker edged up between my legs smiling kinda it was soosos hot hot air ventilated out behind the classrooms at the far end of the school we’d get gravel in our clothes sitting on the bus alone oh yeah my emo boyfriend we picked each other’s scabs he showed me a note from his girlfriend we laughed ha ha hahahah

Dear Jack,

his name was Jack oh jack o jack he had these white Seraph wings he had these big sweat bands around his wrists Nothing else matters

oh jack oh jack oh Jack oh jack of all the falling fading stars played “Righteousness” on his guitar (by After School Knife Party, XoXo) he thought a band could ‘scend him from his

But you.

My severed wings bleed Inside im numb.

My hands are bound My tongue is tiiiiieeddd

HEARTBREAKERRRRR Your a HEARTBREAKERRRRRR A FUCKING HEARTBREAKERR AND I SWEAR jack was the singular most popular and hot person ever and he never asked me to the dance it was true idk

my bunndy died.

4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva4eva

April 22, 2016

LITERARY

10

SIN OF SIMCITY Victory and Failure in Virtual Urban Space

by Will Weatherly

To a 15-year old Providence Journal writer named Joseph Braude, it made a lot of sense: invite five of the candidates in the 1990 mayoral election to compete in a SimCity tournament, design a SimProvidence for them to develop, and see who was most effective at leading a fake version of their real city. The groundbreaking computer game, which allowed players to act as virtual mayors controlling urban design, development, and management, was then only a year old. The Journal focused on getting as accurate a rendering of the city as possible on a Macintosh II; a computer scientist, cartographer, and research consultant used Providence’s ground plan and topographical data to provide a virtual clone, complete with a pixelated Providence River and Harbor, correct zoning, traffic congestion, and a then-towering crime rate (represented as a percentage which would decrease as the player built more police stations).

None of the five candidates who agreed to compete were familiar with the game, and only a few owned a computer at the time, so Braude volunteered to sit at each candidate’s respective keyboards and Sim by proxy. With his help, each candidate’s performance in the game could be seen as indexical to their political and logistical finesse, rather than any technical skill. What started as a common-sense logistical decision ended up complicating the ontological dilemma of the competition itself. What was on trial here: the limits of a video game to approximate local urban management? Or the limits of urban management to fulfill their role in a video game?

Providence was then (and still is) the only US city to host a competition of this kind. For Journal editor Alan Rosenberg, the competition aimed to provide more of an insight into “the aspect of computer simulation of running a city than the political ramifications of the story,” as he told Vice last year. But as the Journal started publishing the results of each candidates’ SimCity session, the implications of the project grew difficult to ignore. One player, Democratic candidate Victoria Lederberg, refused to let Braude control the keyboard, despite having no previous experience with computers and no familiarity with the game itself. Her predictably disastrous experience skewed the public’s perception of the competition against her; because other competing candidates didn’t have to contend with the machine behind the mayorship, Lederberg’s technical difficulties produced a dismal virtual city in comparison. As Braude reported in 1990, Lederberg “built more police stations in Providence than probably exist in all of Southeastern New England,” replaced an electric power plant with a nuclear reactor four years post-Chernobyl, and bulldozed a church in a state that was, in actuality, 63 percent Catholic. Frustrated, she “asserted that [the game] had nothing to do with her political aspirations.” Lederberg lost the Democratic primary by 482 votes to party frontrunner Andrew Annaldo, who credits his electoral success to his campaign promise to leverage fees on (real-life) local universities, and whose virtual taxes were rising by the end of his SimProvidence stint. The specter of Lederberg’s failure, however, and her apathy towards her virtual citizens, was hard to shake. “A lot of people felt that she lost the [Democratic] primary for having performed poorly,” Braude said. And despite being a family friend, Lederberg refused to speak to Braude following his article in the Journal; she died in 2003 after 13 years of sworn silence.

Just as the tournament was mirroring, and in some ways adding to, the narrative of Lederberg’s fall, it also became part of some of the election’s most dramatic success stories. The competition and the election shared their two frontrunners: Fred Lippitt, an independent described by the Journal as a “paradigm of Rhode Island’s privileged class,” and Buddy Cianci, the famed longtime-serving mayor of Providence, who was then running for re-election as an independent 6 years after resigning on charges of an assault on a Bristol contractor.

Both candidates’ success at SimCity came largely from their commitment to take the game deadly seriously; Braude observed that Lippitt and Cianci talked to the avatars on their computer screens like any other civic worker they could boss around, Lippitt going so far

11

ARTS

as to speak “into an imaginary mouthpiece [about] politics and his outlook on life.”

Lippitt and Cianci shared a fondness for a strong police presence in their cities, but Cianci’s SimCity had the economic edge. Cianci was a great virtual bookkeeper. “He was the only candidate who had taken the trouble to scribble his expenses on a scratchpad,” Braude wrote. When Cianci was asked, before his death this winter, what he remembered about his SimCity, he remarked that it emulated much of his governing philosophy. “You spend some money here, you spend some money there,” he said. “You had to make those kinds of choices everyday as a mayor… you’ll lose some votes, you’ll gain some votes.

Sometimes you make a good choice, sometimes it’s a not-so-good choice.”

Cianci won the 1990 election by 317 votes over Lippitt, and while Braude’s tournament declared no definite winner, his article lauded Cianci for his brass-tacks approach to virtual governance. Many commentators remarked that Cianci’s political success rode primarily on the back of his enduring local legacy, but it is harder to explain his simulated success so succinctly. By treating SimCity like real city managing, Cianci was able to identify and optimize its indicators of a city’s success, with a low crime rate, maximized city revenue, and a balanced budget. But his triumph over his competitors like Lederberg was equally as predicated on their observation that the simulation was limited and inauthentic—a judgment with equal merit, perhaps, that nevertheless hindered their ability to see the stakes of the game.

Questions of the limits of SimCity’s reality seem equally entwined with Providence’s history when considering what else a video game necessarily leaves out of a view into Cianci’s rule: an alleged rape at gunpoint, an over-reliance on police power, and an administration rife with corruption. Yet our city’s past also marks one of the strongest cases for the game’s consistent allure of almost-reality. The 1990 tournament is a telling portrait of SimCity itself, a game just real enough to be disturbing, and just unreal enough to be fun. +++ In accordance with SimCity’s frequent description as “a God game,” its origins are now near-mythological. (Though the game enables players a top-down control of legions of citizens, Will Wright, the original creator of SimCity and co-founder of its developer Maxis, would scoff at the religious description; he is a stout atheist). Inspiration for the game came from Wright’s original 1984 game Raid on Bungling Bay, a helicopter-simulator turned shoot-’em-up whose success in Japan funded the development of SimCity in 1989. Wright decided that constructing the buildings on the targeted islands was a lot more fun than actually bombing the islands, and set out to find methods of developing his productive urge into a new product.

Wright eventually based his theories of simulation on three examples: the free-form creativity offered by his early Montessori school education, the computer scientists John Conway’s pioneering work in using cellular automata for increasingly advanced simulations, and M.I.T. professor Jay Wright Forrester’s book Urban Dynamics, which argued for increased implementation of computer simulation in urban planning. Forrester’s work proved to be the most indicative of the game to come; he was the one of the first scientists to simulate a city in a computer model. “Except in his simulation, there was no map; it was just numbers,” Wright told Gamasutra. “It was like population level, number of jobs—it was kind of a spreadsheet model.”

Fundamentally, SimCity doesn’t stray too far from Forrester’s original simulation in relying on localized and highly visible metrics like crime rates and traffic flow to gauge a user’s success; Wright’s challenge was to gamify this spreadsheet. “I thought it might appeal to a few architects and city planner types,” he said, “but not average people.” His partner and Maxis co-founder Jeff Braun felt differently.

“Will showed me the game and he said, ‘No one likes it, because you

The College Hill Independent

can’t win,” Braun told the New Yorker in 2006. “But I thought it was great. I foresaw an audience of megalomaniacs who want to control the world.”

The game, and its more than 20 subsequent iterations and spin-offs, has exceeded $230 million in worldwide revenue for Maxis, prompting the New Yorker to call it “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.” It was so “influential” that, during Herman Cain’s 2011 Republican primary bid, commentators gleefully observed that his proposed tax code exactly mirrored the default rates in any SimCity.

What is confusing in the game’s theoretical backing, and its reception as a revolution in urban simulation, is that Wright claims he never intended SimCity to be a work of urban-design theory at all. “A lot of the times, we’ll simulate things on purpose inaccurately just for entertainment value,” Wright told Gamasutra. “I realized early on… it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations…as predictive endeavors.

But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.” He gives an example of the original SimCity’s nuclear reactors, which, in something closer to an evocation of late 80s paranoia than of actual nuclear infrastructure, exploded at a high frequency for apocalyptic player scenarios.

It is this contradiction between SimCity as a game or a simulation, as a commentary or a caricature, that produces some of its most interesting possibilities as a method of analysis for urban planning.

Neither interpretation is entirely true without the other, and it is the confluence of the two understandings—the game within the real, and the real within the game—that ultimately proves most accurate.

Later versions of SimCity have advertised themselves as increasingly accurate, with the latest version touting inter-regional trade, advanced systems for energy allocation, and discrete modeling for every vehicle, resource, and pile of trash in users’ SimCities. In an eerie case of cyclical history, Fast Company Magazine enlisted six urban design teams in 2014 to test just how realistic this new attempt at realism could be. Each team utilized their real-world expertise, from creating walkable and sustainable downtown hubs to optimizing industrial development. But despite their best intentions, many of the urban planners became tempted by the immediate gratification some planning decisions offered; they invested quickly and heavily in fossil fuels, failing to build enough pedestrian walkways or to adequately fund education in the process. For SimCity designer Stone Librande, the game’s incentivizing of bad policy is just another step towards the real. “It’s designed to make players make unsustainable decisions. We want people to understand why it happens in the real world,” Librande told Fast Company. But he also doesn’t deny that denying more utopic possibilities is equally part of SimCity’s game logic as well: “As a game designer, a utopia is kind of boring because once you achieve it, there’s no challenge. Once I come up with equilibrium, I have no compulsion to play anymore.”

By necessitating the impossibility of sustainable cities as part of a game, and by identifying this as realistic in the same breath, SimCity stops being a depiction of the ambition of the urban project and starts heralding its certain failure. As Fast Company writer John McDermott says, “Entropy cannot be stopped. A utopia is illusory. Everything is destroyed in time…SimLife sucks, and then you SimDie.” The stakes of SimCity’s Malthusian narrative, however, are much more consequential than video game nihilism, especially when real-world methods of neoliberal urban analysis present themselves as equally accurate, and with similar methods of erasure. Urban designer Daniel Lobo analyzed how urban planning has come to model itself after SimCity through its use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which uses similar tools for modeling, zoning, and census analytics.

Schools often use SimCity as a teaching model for urban planning and politics for this reason. However, even more advanced GIS can produce a narrow understanding of urban policy choices, usually centered

April 22, 2016

solely around data. “A GIS by itself cannot make choices on issues like gentrification, race inequality or immigration,” Lobo writes. “This SimCity-like analysis can blind city leaders to problems that lie outside of the system’s geographic or political scope.”

SimCity’s depiction of homelessness is the logical end of this treatment, where a civic disaster can be seen and explained from the distance of urban metrics. IULM University of Milan professor Matteo Bittanti compiled a 600-page compendium of the backlash against the homeless on SimCity forums in 2013, and the transcript leaves a haunting impression of digital and urban disassociation alike. “I have 0 percent unemployment so it appears these sims are oddly choosing to be homeless. I don’t know if this is a bug...” one user wrote. Another: “Once you have homeless, they hang out, panhandling and eating garbage. Make sure your garbage collection is operating adequately and they will either disappear (die?) or wander off down the highway.”

What was at first glance to be callous annoyance at the simulation is increasingly reminiscent of the way neoliberal urbanism problematizes homelessness as a failure of proper metrics, a glitch in an otherwise smoothly controlled machine. +++ As in the fallout after the Providence tournament, we can never fully invest in our simulations’ claim to authenticity. Neither can we divest from the concrete, meaningful impact of what we call artificial. What we can do is make both operative, in relation to and against one another.

Vincent Ocasla, a 22-year-old architecture student living in the Philippines, spent more than three years of his life conceptualizing, planning, and building Magnasanti: an artistic expression of urban economic and spiritual oppression through a SimCity optimized to have the maximum number of residents. The city is a feat of both magnitude and order. None of Magnansanti’s six million residents have to walk farther than their block for their work, so there is no traffic congestion. Due to noxious levels of air pollution, none of the residents live past 50 either. This, in conjunction with a “hyper-efficient policestate,” helps to quell any insurrection resulting from Magnasanti’s miserable conditions. Thus the city is remarkably stable; Magnasanti lasted upwards of 50,000 in game years, with every citizen stuck in a loop of work and rest, backlash and suppression, birth and death.

Oscala may be stretching SimCity’s rules, and its grasp on reality, but in doing so produces a much more coherent account of urbanization’s elements of dystopia than any attempt at realism could portray.

Neil Gaiman, in an essay titled “Simcity,” tried to evoke the possibilities of an urban imaginary: “There are good cities...There are indifferent cities...There are cities gone bad… There are even cities that seem lost… some, lacking a centre, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand.”

To better understand our SimCities, perhaps, is for us to stop seeing them as models of here, and start imagining their possibilities elsewhere.

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 has a twin brother who’s a real SimTyrant.

ARTS

12

BLOOD COMING OUT OF HER EYES On Anti-Abortion Legislation in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland

by Isabelle Doyle illustration by Sabrina Mortensen A very old man asked me who I thought I was last Wednesday as I walked into Planned Parenthood for my volunteer shift. He said other things, too, but he asked Who do you think you are? with a special acidity.

Because of the organization’s non-engagement policy, I did not respond. Whenever I am addressed outside the clinic by women carrying rosaries or men carrying signs that say things like UNBORN BLACK LIVES MATTER, I build diatribes in my head, arguments I think would shut them up. I add to my mental tirade throughout my day. By the time I go to sleep, it is ruthless and endless.

Who do you think you are, however, is a difficult question. It is not the kind of question I am usually asked. Who do I think I am? My immediate thought, in the context of that situation, was I am a person with a womb.

I wish it had been: I am a person. +++ There has to be some form of punishment.

I am nineteen years old. I have ten fingers, ten toes, two knees, two elbows, one womb, one chin, one nose. I am driving with my dad through Wexford, Ireland, the country he grew up in, which we are both citizens of. Every so often, on the side of the road, there are small shrines to the Virgin, white ceramic women draped in flowers: bitter-cress, anemone, garden-yellow archangel, bluebell. My dad points out blackberry bushes, the River Barrow at New Ross, wild ducks and kingfishers, compact cathedrals on the side of the road. I was born in America, but this is where my whole family lives. This is where I feel most at home. This is where I will be imprisoned if I take a tablet that induces miscarriage.

“Who is this ‘they’ you’re always railing against?” my dad asks me. “Is it men? Is it the government? Every man in the government who advocates for unborn children?

They’re not trying to hurt you, you know.”

Aren’t they?

There has to be some form of punishment. +++ Irish republicans in Southern Ireland seceded from the UK and established the Republic of Ireland in 1922, while Northern Ireland remained part of the UK, splitting the Irish people into two nation-states.

Today, Northern Ireland is the only region of the UK where abortion is illegal. The Abortion Act of 1967 allows abortion everywhere else in the UK for people up to 24 weeks pregnant, but under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, any person in Northern Ireland who has an abortion can be imprisoned for life. Abortion is also illegal in the Irish Republic, under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013.

Every day, 12 women cross the Irish Sea in order to have abortions. These women must pay for private procedures (which cost around 400 euro), as well as for travel and accommodations, an expense that is impossible for many people.

Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2014: a 19-year-old woman, a woman exactly my age, had a self-administered abortion using pills she bought online. Had this woman lived anywhere else in the UK, had she lived in England, Scotland, or Wales, she would not have been in danger of persecution. She wanted to travel to England to have a legal abortion, but she had no money to make the trip.

13

FEATURES

On July 28, 2014, this woman’s housemates found a fetus in a black bag in a trashcan and contacted the police. This woman was prosecuted. This woman pled guilty to inducing miscarriage using a poison.

On April 4, 2016, this woman was given a three-month jail sentence.

There has to be some form of punishment. +++ Over 30 percent of people in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today endure enforced deprivation, a form of poverty typified as a lack of two or more basic needs, such as satisfactory heat and food. In 2001, 14 percent more women than men lived below the poverty line.

This 19-year-old woman wanted to travel to England in order to procure a legal abortion. She had no money to make the trip. She bought mifepristone and misoprostol pills, which are affordable (less than 100 euro) and can be obtained through charities such as Women on Web or Women Help Women, which together field 3,000 requests for help from Irish women every year.

How is it possible that Irish women earn three-quarters as much money as Irish men, and yet it is primarily women who must pay to travel to another country in order to procure basic healthcare? How is it possible that so many Irish live in poverty, and yet are forced to give birth to and support more and more people, who are not only born into this poverty, but whose existence perpetuates the poverty of their parents?

There has to be some form of punishment. +++ The Belfast branch of the Mary Stopes International abortion clinic is the only clinic in Northern Ireland not covered by the UK National Health Service, and is licensed to enact abortions only when the patient’s health is under “serious risk.”

But who defines what is a “serious risk” to you? Shouldn’t the devastating psychological and socio-economical effects of losing ownership of your body, of being forced to either give up a child you have given birth to, or raise a child you cannot afford, count? Who decides what will and will not hurt you?

Galway, Republic of Ireland, 2012: Savita Halappanavar, 31 years old and 17 weeks pregnant, began miscarrying on a Sunday in October. She was admitted to University Hospital Galway, and died seven days later of septicemia. Halappanavar had asked for a termination of her pregnancy on multiple occasions, and had been refused each time.

Both Ireland’s Health Service Executive and Health Information and Quality Authority found that there had been insufficient monitoring of Halappanavar during her time in the hospital, as well as a “lack of recognition of the gravity of the situation and the increasing risk to the life of the mother,” as well as 13 “missed opportunities” which, had they been taken, may have “resulted in a different outcome” for Halappanavar.

Who decides what will and will not hurt you?

There has to be some form of punishment.

The 19-year-old woman in Northern Ireland is being prosecuted. She is going

The College Hill Independent

to prison. Because of this, other women are not going to come forward during emergencies caused by self-induced abortions. They are not going to seek medical attention. Examples of women aided by medical attention will be examples of women who are in prison. Women who do not seek medical attention will die from septic hemorrhages and other incredibly painful complications because they are afraid to seek healthcare. +++ Suzanne Lee, a 23-year-old mathematics student from Belfast, became pregnant earlier this year, and had a self-induced abortion using tablets she bought online. “I had good support from my friends,” Lee said, “But it was still very stressful to take the pill with no medical supervision. Later I went to a family planning clinic for a checkup and they advised me to have an ultrasound check. As a student I couldn’t afford it so I just had some blood tests and hoped everything would be okay.”

In a 1990s Middlesex University study, 11 percent of general practitioners in Northern Ireland reported that they had witnessed the effects of “attempts at amateur abortion.” Abortion laws have not changed since then. In fact, abortion laws in Northern Ireland have not changed since the Victorian Era. “The second day, as soon as I took them, I immediately started to bleed,” Lee said.

“It was strange because it was such a relief to start bleeding, to know that they were working, to know that soon it was going to be all over.”

“It was painful,” Lee said, “But I expected that.”

There has to be some form of punishment. +++ Irish customs officials regularly confiscate packages believed to contain abortion pills.

Charities no longer ship these pills to the Irish Republic, because more likely than not, they will never arrive.

When I go to Ireland to see my family, if I babysit my cousins, and have blood drawn, and climb through the blackberry bush, and swim in the sea that is too cold for sharks, and get my hair cut, and go to the doctor for a checkup, and take a pill to induce miscarriage, I could be imprisoned.

If you are in Ireland and you want an abortion, you have three options. You can give birth to a baby you don’t want and can’t afford. You can be imprisoned. Or, you can go to England. You can pack a suitcase and drive for hours. You can get your things together, leave your family and your home, leave the blackberry bushes and bittercress flowers, ceramic virgins and kingfishers, cross the Irish sea.

I am a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. If I am in Ireland, and I take a pill to induce miscarriage, I could be imprisoned. For me specifically, though, there is physical and legal distance. I am also a citizen of the United States, and I don’t live in Ireland.

I have ten female cousins and six aunts who do. My cousin Anna was born six weeks before I was. There is a picture of us, taken when we were six, taped to my bedroom wall. We are running along the seashore on the coast of Wexford, both wearing blue t-shirts, our dark hair covering our faces. You cannot tell us apart.

April 22, 2016

I don’t live in Ireland, but I am so, so close.

My body is meant to take me places. My body is meant to allow me to move, to speak, to touch. My body is meant to be a tool to gain me access to the world.

Somehow, with all the access my body garners me, I am not allowed access to my own body. I am not my own.

There has to be some form of punishment. +++ Since the 19-year-old woman was sentenced to imprisonment, over 200 campaigners have signed an open letter to the Public Prosecution Service professing that they have bought abortion pills for themselves or other people, and claiming that they are willing to be arrested. So far, police have been unwilling to take action against these women.

Three women have made multiple attempts to surrender themselves to the police, but officers keep canceling appointments.

Women on Web is an online abortion help service for countries where people do not have access to safe abortions. The website is a project of Women on Waves, a nonprofit created by a Dutch physician in 1999 to bring abortion services to women. Mifepristone and misoprostol pills are sent by mail under the supervision of a doctor, and the website also serves as a digital community for people who have had abortions and for organizations that support abortion rights. Women on Web receives thousands of emails every day from women around the world, including requests for help and general inquiries about abortion, and the site facilitates a community of women through their project I Had an Abortion, which allows women to upload their portraits and their stories.

On April 7, hundreds of women protested outside the office of the director of public prosecutions in Belfast. “How many women were disgusted by Trump’s comments about how women seeking abortion should be punished?” a spokesperson for the Alliance for Choice organization asked. “Well, this is actually happening right now in Northern Ireland.”

Suzanne Lee, the mathematics student from Belfast, said: “I have taunted the police to arrest me, but I really don’t think they have the backbone to do that.”

Because of the prosecution of this 19-year-old woman, knowledge is spreading among Irish women that these pills exist, that these pills are accessible. There are risks, and they come both from procedures and from people. But there are other people, and they are people we can turn to. There is medicine we can take.

This prosecution was intended to make women afraid. It is doing the opposite.

FEATURES

14

SOFT SYSTEMS

by Ryan Rosenberg

On the East End of London in 1961, theater producer Joan Littlewood was thinking about ways to disrupt theater-going experiences that favored a bourgeois audience. She conceived of an immersive performance style in which the congealed membrane between actor and audience melted. When an audience entered a typical theater, they understood that it was their bodies’ role to sit still and be polite. Littlewood wanted to encourage the opposite. She wrote an article in the New Scientist in which she described her imagined theater: Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it.

Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favorite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what's happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting—or just lie back and stare at the sky.

Littlewood imagined an informal physical space that lacked permanent structures. She mused that some of these structures might not last more than ten years, some not even ten days. “No concrete stadia, stained and cracking, no legacy of noble contemporary architecture, quickly dating ... With informality goes flexibility,” she wrote. Unlike the rigidity and exclusivity of an average theater in Britain at the time, her new theater, The Fun Palace, would change according to the desires of its visitors. In the years that followed, she worked with architect Cedric Price to devise a structural embodiment of her idea.

Sketch of The Fun Palace, Cedric Price, 1963

Although The Fun Palace was never realized, it marked the conceptual birth of the movement that became known as soft architecture. The “soft” aspect of soft architecture might literally refer to soft materials, structures, or sounds, or it might figuratively allude to an emphasis on change, process, and interactive methods of problem-solving and design. But really, the dichotomy of soft versus hard materials is irrelevant: a structure made out of cement or stucco can still act soft.

The plan was that the The Fun Palace’s skeletal, scaffold-like framework would be in constant movement. Its components would vary in shape and size. Escalators, walkways, and balconies would interact with each other and liberate the occupant’s path of movement. The scaffolding’s ephemeral quality would recall its uncertain lifespan. Instead of the lasting institution of a grand theater, The Fun Palace would be a place of change, renewal, and destruction. Cedric Price wrote of his Fun Palace design: “The elimination of the word ‘success’ is important. The place is a constantly changing experiment in which the old human categories are forgotten, e.g. brilliant, superior, stupid, dull. Each is capable of what was once called genius.” Experimentation was valued over dictation, potentiality over certainty. As bodies inevitably transform and meld, soft systems are a means of acceptance.

Soft structures are built to match the bodies inside of them, to change and age and melt like they do.

The Fun Palace inspired the 1977 construction of the Centre Georges Pompidou, a modern art museum and public library in Paris, which looks as if it is made entirely out of scaffolding. The building’s guts are color-coded and displayed on its exterior: air ducts are blue, water pipes are green, electrics are yellow, and elevators and escalators are red. Unlike the Louvre Museum, a former royal palace with impermeable walls of white concrete, the Pompidou challenges fixed barriers and invites interaction. Another soft project that unravels norms of conventional workplace etiquette is Hans Hollein’s 1969 inflatable mobile office. Combining softness and nomadism with work, the structure collapses the office cubicle. Yet on some level, Hollein's mobile office is ironically suggestive of the widespread demise of the traditional office in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when open, flexible work places, decorated with snack walls and egg chairs, would become central to new management strategies. One can't help but think of the bowling alleys and adjustable desks that adorn Google’s offices, their primary function being to fuel company commitment and maximize productivity.

15

ARTS

Mobile Office, Hans Hollein, 1969

+++ Imagine a typical suburban house. In order to get water flowing out of the kitchen sink, without question, the faucet must be turned. Outside, Belgian block separates my driveway from yours. Inside, the floor is flat. That room over there is where mom and dad sleep soundly, that room over there is where we all watch Sunday night football on the couch while we eat Domino’s pizza. The Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), designed in 2008 by husband-and-wife architecture/poetry writing team Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins deconstructs this archetype. Its foamy and uneven interior terrain knocks its inhabitants off balance. To navigate certain areas of the house, you might be better off crawling or sliding than walking. Arakawa and Gins believed that living in a typical house, in which we know how we are supposed to move and behave, halts creativity, promotes staleness, and eventually ensures death. “It’s immoral that people have to die,” Gins told the New York Times. A radical re-figuring of how a body might normally move is intended to stimulate one’s immune system and emulate a deathless life. The Bioscleave House’s structural strangeness is meant to ward off death by exercising and productively confusing its inhabitant.

The couple formed The Reversible Destiny Foundation, whose mission is to think about extending lifespans through procedural architecture. The viability of The Reversible Destiny model is vague. Both Arakawa and Gins died in their early seventies, but still, the bodily performance that is required to navigate their spaces certainly exercises numb bodies and unlocks youthful spirits. Arakawa once described the experience of elderly people in a building designed by the couple in Mitaka, Japan, stating that some navigated the space by moving “like a snake” across the floor. “Three, four months later, they say, ‘You’re so right, I’m so healthy now!’”

Yoro Park, another one of the couple’s projects, is a death defying playground. There are no monkey-bars from which we are supposed to swing, or sandboxes from which we are supposed to dig, but instead undulating and disorienting planes and paths. Arakawa and Gins believed that the “juggling, jumbling, and reshuffling” of the body that is required to navigate the park, “introduces a person to the process that constitutes being a person.” Experimentation and non-normativity is at the forefront of these projects, further expanding upon Littlewood’s vision of a soft space. Similarly, upon entering the space, a body cannot predict how it might behave.

prohibited her from sculpting with glass fibre or polyester, and she instead adapted to working with softer materials. When she was confined to her bed, she started sewing and creating sculptures from balsa wood and cloth. Horn’s sculptural prosthetics extend her body’s ability to reach-towards.

Horn’s 1972 piece, Feather Fingers, in which the performer attaches a feather on metal rings to each finger, explores touch through prosthetic sculpture. When wearing the feather fingers and touching one’s own body, one’s sensitivity to touch heightens. The sensation requires the feathers’ touch, and yet, the movement stems from the wearer’s body. Horn described the effect: “It is as if one hand had suddenly become disconnected from the other like two utterly unrelated beings. My sense of touch becomes so disrupted that the different behavior of each hand triggers contradictory sensations.” She demonstrates that touch displays an urge to depart from one’s own body and reachtowards other bodies. Horn explores sensation and interaction in her performance piece Unicorn, in which the wearer walks through a field wearing a unicorn horn and body straps identical to the ones depicted in Frida Kahlo’s 1944 painting Broken Column. Kahlo painted Broken Column shortly after undergoing spinal surgery.

Pencil Mask, Rebecca Horn, 1972

In her performance pieces, Horn aims to absorb the role of the spectator into that of the performer. Artist Shasti O’Leary Soudant wrote in an essay that Horn’s work is an effort “to heal the separations between our conscripted bodies and our alienated psyches,”; she “employs a plurality of resistances, ensuring that no single strategy congeal into an unstable core of insurgency.” From this encounter of spectator and performer, bodies and sensual repertoires are expanded. In this process, a sensory transformation occurs, an event that Horn calls “pure art.”

The behavior of soft structures likes Horn’s work is linked to theorist Erin Manning’s thoughts on touch and tactility. Manning writes, “To touch is to become aware that I am not fully formed.” To touch is a risk-taking, political act. Manning describes a multiplicitous self that is constantly globbing onto other multiplicitous selves. An entwinement of identities nurtures an empathetic, self-less self. This notion challenges traditional identity politics. Manning writes that interactions of touch are not about “subjectivity,” but rather about “intensity, potential relations.” Poet Lisa Robertson takes up similar ideas in her book Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. “Under the pavement, pavement,” she writes. In Robertson's writing, surfaces and identities meld into one another; soft architecture concordantly moves away from what Robertson calls “the holy modernism of the white room,” opting, instead, for elaborate surfaces that hold the potential to rub against other elaborate surfaces. +++

Yoro Park and the Site of Reversible Destiny

+++ German artist Rebecca Horn’s work functions as an apparatus of soft architecture. In the same year both of her parents died, Horn contracted a lung condition after working with glass fibre without wearing a mask. In her sorrow and isolation, she began experimenting with sculpture and creating performance pieces that communicated through bodily practices. Her work became known as body-extension sculptures. The condition

In his 2002 novel The Father Costume, Ben Marcus describes a young boy who dreams of creating something akin to a soft system that would stabilize his father’s unpredictable and violent nature: “If it were up to me, I would dress my father in a long, clear sleep costume. I would knit linens from my mother’s abandoned luggage and spray them from the costume gun onto my father…If it were up to me, I would soak my father’s hands in milk, then fit them with gloves of hemp. I would use the leftover milk to make a writing.”

Soft apparatuses hold the potential to alter states of accepted normativity. Soft architecture is adaptable; it might take shape in the form of scaffolding at a construction site, or appear as honeysuckle vines draping a fence. It can adorn a body or take shape as bodies interacting with other bodies. Sticky surfaces and permeable membranes are everywhere. Lisa Robertson proposes that language is itself soft. “Words are fleshy ducts.

Description decorates.”

RYAN ROSENBERG B’17 likes soft serve.

The College Hill Independent

GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR BODY Going Beyond Numbers, Diets, and Standards

by Anna Xu illustration by Lynnette Munoz

Mainstream US society is obsessed with thinness and perfection. In magazines, newspapers, and television, models are regularly photoshopped down to size zeroes, perpetuating body standards that most people cannot realistically reach. Along with this culture of thinness comes a culture of dieting and, sometimes, starving.

It doesn’t help that many public health studies suggest that being overweight will lead to greater health issues such as heart disease, sleep apnea, and arthritis. Even still, being thin does not necessarily lead to a perfectly healthy life. A study called published in The Lancet in 2006 found that the lowest risk of all types of mortality compared to other body mass ranges was found in people considered overweight (body mass index of 25-30). Additionally, being overweight isn’t necessarily negatively correlated with overall health and fitness.

There are people with body mass index numbers that would put them in the “overweight” category who can run marathons, bench press hundreds of pounds or do other actions that are typically associated with good health and fitness. At the very least, these realities highlight how individualized health markers are—“fat” and “thin” are not nuanced enough to describe health states.

This active perpetuation of thin ideals, however, does often lead people to use external visual markers as signs of health rather than internal body cues. One such harmful consequence may be damaging eating disorders that have been characterized by the objectifying and judging of the body according to unrealistic external standards. This objectification and judgment can lead to ignoring hunger cues that would otherwise send important feedback on nutrients the body needs and information on ways the body wants to move in order to enjoy living. The Eating Disorder Inventory, a self-report questionnaire used to assess the presence of eating disorders in clinical patients, gives a clear picture of how these and body dysmorphic disorders can severely decrease a patient’s quality of life. The inventory provides a partial list of the various symptoms linked to disordered eating (or the actual disorders?), including: nervous feelings surrounding sweets and carbohydrates, guilt after eating or overeating, terror of gaining weight, confusion surrounding feeling hungry, becoming bloated after just one small meal, eating when upset, feeling that everything on one’s body is too big, wishing to return to happier times, and some distrust with relationships. These feelings don’t even encapsulate the other physiological medical concerns surrounding eating disorders, such as starvation or too much exercise in some cases of anorexia.

Despite the perpetuation of thin ideals and subsequent clinical disorders that may be caused by it, movements that help people become in touch with their body do exist. These movements emphasize listening to the body’s internal cues in order to get a better sense of its state of health. One such movement is mindfulness.

Through meditative practice, mindfulness attempts to bring the mind back to the present moment whenever it wanders away, as some may experience in a society in which we are usually so busy either anticipating the past or the present. In the scientific community, mindfulness-based approaches have also been shown

April 22, 2016

to be useful for eating disorders. In the case of eating, mindfulness can be helpful in bringing our attention away from the diet and back to eating for the sake of eating. The goal behind mindful eating is being more aware of what you are consuming—how it tastes, what the texture of the food is, and why you are eating it.

Mindful eating has already been popularized in books such as Ruth Wolfever’s The Mindful Diet, which discusses the issues behind traditional dieting—mainly that even when people do start a diet, they don’t stick with it—and argues that an awareness of our internal signals can help us be reflexive about what the food we’re eating (and what we’re experiencing as we’re eating) does to us.

In studies investigating mindfulness-based interventions for eating disorders, such as one done

by Ruth A. Baer et. al, participants in mindfulness intervention showed decreases in food cravings, body image concerns, emotional eating and external eating compared to controls. More interestingly, mindfulness intervention seemed to also show a stronger increase in awareness of internal experiences and of automated patterns related to eating, emotion regulation and selfacceptance. In the scientific literature, being aware of one’s internal body state (such as by noticing how tense, tired, or hungry one’s body is) is known as interoceptive awareness. Eating disorders seem to be correlated with decreased interoceptive awareness, and the simple act of returning to the body, listening to it, and increasing one’s awareness of it may have a profound effect on helping people to remember that they are more than just numbers on a scale or an outline in a mirror. The lesson here is that thin ideals won’t necessarily make our bodies happy—external standards of health (such as the visual perception of the body or numbers on a scale) may exist, but if we are feeling psychologically distressed over our obsession with these standards, there is definitely something wrong.

While health recommendations may give some suggestion of how to be healthy, it is important to also listen to the body to really understand how it is feeling, rather than just relying on numbers on a scale or diet fads. We have bodies that tell us whether we’re distressed or not, and it’s very easy to ignore what our body is telling us when our eating habits or body image is disturbed. We also have bodies that aren’t the same, and no standards can truly replace what our body is telling us. Mindfulness studies are show us is that our bodies give important cues about health and well-being that we increasingly tend to miss, and listening to them may help us have a healthier sense of ourselves in a society obsessed with external visual markers.

ANNA XU B’18 is not defined by numbers.

SCIENCE

16

STEM

SELLS

Pinkification in Science Marketing

by Eve Zelickson illustration by Teri Minogue

Tim Hunt, the English biochemist who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in physiology, stood in front of a room packed with the world’s brightest, most progressive female scientists and addressed his reputation as a male chauvinist. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls… three things happen when they are in the lab…You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.” Hunt’s patronizing remarks at the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists, hosted by the Korean Women’s Federation of Science and Technology, left both men and women, scientists and nonscientists, talking about women’s position in the scientific field. Female scientists across the globe posted pictures on Twitter of themselves at work, draped in long, white lab coats that covered their curves and large, safety masks that hid half their faces, with the ironic hashtag “distractingly sexy.”

Comments like Hunts’ may be part of the reason that, although women make up 58 percent of the overall workforce, they hold less than 25 percent of jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The US Department of Commerce found that only one in seven engineers is female. The gross inequality that is the low number of women in STEM illustrates a greater, historic residue of sexism fixed to the under-belly of many STEM fields.

While many scientific departments are trying to woo girls into picking up a pipette, the feeling isn’t always mutual, and studies have shown that women’s disinterest is correlated to their early experiences with math and science. While girls make up 56 percent of all AP test-takers, they make up only 19 percent of AP Computer Science test takers. This trend continues into college where two percent of male freshmen list computer science as their intended major, while only 0.3 percent of females select computer science as their concentration.

Many toy companies are taking this challenge to heart, believing that it is their social responsibility to help get more girls involved in STEM. Unfortunately, many of these companies are doing so by perpetuating gender stereotypes; luring girls in with pastel colors and beauty norms. Take, for example, the Lovely Lip-Balm kit by Science Explorer, where you can learn “cool spa science.” Or maybe you’d prefer the Bubble Bath Science Lab, where you can make your own smelly concoction by mixing together essential oils; “it’s real chemistry,” the packaging promises. The Magnificent Manicure Kit will leave you with beautiful hands for lab work while the Perfume Science Kit will let you freshen up between experiments. If those don’t satisfy your complicated lady needs, you can also try the Luxury Soap Science Lab, so you’ll have “designer soap” on hand to clean yourself, or the kitchen.

And if you just aren’t that into cosmetic science, well then the

17

SCIENCE

Stylin’ Studio by Girl Tech is just right for you. This digital camera that connects to your laptop will supposedly teach you computer skills by photoshopping pictures of yourself. Because if you can’t achieve beauty through the cosmetic science kits, you can at least fake it with this one!

Marketing the princess complex to young girls, companies have smugly convinced themselves that they are growing the next generation of scientists, when all they are doing is propagating stereotypes and creating a new sect of dumbed down, girl science. A leader in the pushback against products that stress appearance alongside ability, Melissa Atkins Wardy, founder of Pigtail Pals & Ballcap Buddies, a company attempting to redefine girly through apparel, believes that using stereotypes to sell STEM to girls is “the equivalent of covering broccoli in melted, processed cheese and thinking we’ve served a healthy meal.” Wardy argues that when we use beauty norms to sell STEM toys to girls “we fool ourselves into thinking we are amazing and progressive and raising an incredible generation of female engineers, however we continue to sell our girls short.”

It isn’t just the big brand companies that are marketing on shiny, pink platforms promising beauty. Jewelbots, founded by computer science majors Sara Chipps and Brooke Moreland, sells friendship bracelets that supposedly teach girls to code by plugging in simple equations that then “light up when a BFF is near.” Jewelbots’ science blog consists of doit-yourself food facials, nail polish, and mason jar organizers.

While there is definitely a distinction between the cosmetic science kits, which simply reinforce gender roles, and Jewelbots bracelets, which appear to impart actual knowledge to its user, it is nevertheless disheartening to see accomplished female scientists such as Chipps and Brooke market genderspecific products to the next generation after having suffered the challenges of being a woman in the field themselves.

Marketing that values beauty norms alongside intelligence certainly reinforces regressive gender roles, but is it necessary in order to intrigue our young female audience?

Debbie Sterline, the CEO of Goldieblox, an engineering tool set for girls, argues yes, saying, “I don’t want to propagate gender stereotypes, but the fact is that boys and girls are different.” Sterline, who has extensively studied the playing habits of boys and girls, says that girls are more inclined to play with a purpose “rather than just building for building, girls have a tendency to prefer playing with characters, themes, and stories.” But there has been no evidence to suggest that these characters, themes, and stories have to be princess ones.

Proponents of segregated markets believe gender-neutrality would eliminate choice, leaving children to play with boring grey blocks. However, removing categorizations is not syn-

onymous with decreasing variety; in the entire Sears catalog ads from 1975, less than two percent of toys were marketed to either gender. Jess Day, a campaigner for Let Toys Be Toys, an organization dedicated to erasing gender marketing, states that the increase in gendered toys stems from the top of large corporations (as opposed to consumer preferences), whose aim is to increase demand by creating products that are less likely to be handed down from a female child to a male child.

While gendering products may be a marketing technique that aims to increase demand it has effectively convinced girls they need to play with toys that promote domesticity and passivity. Studies have found that girls and boys don’t innately gravitate towards certain products; this interest is cultivated through the flawed ways we promote gender. Lise Eliot, an associate professor of neuroscience at Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University, is the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, a book that analyzes cerebral differences in each sex. Eliot cites only two main distinctions in the male brain: boys are exposed to increased testosterone levels in the womb, which is linked to squirminess; and boys have a prolonged development of the frontal lobe, which is linked to impulse control and attention. Ultimately, Eliot concludes that these variations do not suggest intrinsic dissimilarities in the way boys and girls play. “The boy-girl differences are not hardwired into young children,” she says, suggesting that the divide instead stems from the way we socialize gender.

Encouraging girls to get involved in STEM can go a long way as early exposure is key in sparking interest, but we must be cautious in our approaches, being wary of turning lab coats into gowns. While some companies should be commended for their efforts to expose girls to STEM, their creations don’t disrupt the pink aisle; they assume gender stereotypes and thus reinforce the notion that all other products are specifically male, creating a very fixed and limited space for this new “girl science,” and distinguishing it from “boy science.” These companies seem most concerned with grabbing girls’ attention, but where is she to turn after she has exhausted their princess products and is ready for more complex toys? Well, the answer to that remains the boy’s aisle.

The crux of this issue is that these young women (and men) must learn to collaborate because eventually they will be studying and working in environments that are not gender segregated. What better way to ensure this partnership than by fostering it through toys that boys and girls can play with together? If we wish the STEM fields to be as open to girls as they are to boys, then the toys that we provide our future scientists with should reflect this same equality.

EVE ZELICKSON B’19 is sick of the princess complex.

The College Hill Independent

LIST

4.22 Brown Folk Festival 2016 Brown U, Pembroke Field House // 7pm // $3 Two days of folk music starts Friday from 7 to 10.30pm.

Una Noche de Sones Sayles Hall at Brown U, 79 Waterman // 7pm // free The second annual concert of Mariachi de Brown, Brown University’s student mariachi group. Free and open to the public.

WXIN 2016 Rock Hunt Finals The Met, 1005 Main St // 8pm // $5 Battle of the bands featuring 4 local bands. Bill includes a former Indy-editor’s band, Feng Shui Police.

Oneida, Alec K Redfearn, and the Eyesores Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // 9pm // $8 “Brooklyn’s finest art-rock band” — Village Voice Hatchers, Luke Moldof, and Generique Dior Tommy’s Place, 144 Westminster St // 9pm // $6 Experimental music/noise.

4.23 Brown Folk Festival 2016 Brown U, Lincoln Field // 12–6pm // free More folk music.

Mother Tongue, Evil Sword, Dungeon Broads, Lord Scum Psychic Readings, 95 Empire St // 9pm // $6–10 Wow, such a rad line-up. Mother Tongue are some hometown favorites from right here in Providence. Evil Sword, from Philly, totally slay. They’re inspired by magic and elves and things like that. I saw them three years ago at Spark City (RIP) and remember it to this day.

¼ Volume Noise Lounge: Falzone and Glasson Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St, Pawtucket // 6–9pm // free ¼ Volume Noise Lounge is a 3 hour lounge event with music that’s audible but not too loud. Bring a book, a sketching pad, homework, a laptop, a friend, a lover, etc. Sounds really nice.

4.26 RI Democratic Primary Find your polling place at http://www.elections.state.ri.us/ You may say, ‘my vote doesn’t matter.’ Okay, maybe you’ve got a point. It’s late April and Rhode Island is a small state. But I think it’s totally worth it to vote against the DNC establishment. Vote for Bernie Sanders or write-in the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Just my two cents as your humble list editor.

Academic Freedom and the Case for BDS Metcalf Auditorium at Brown U // 6pm // free Rebecca Vilkomerson, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Sarah Schulman, author, academic and activist, will be speaking about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. Questions to be discussed include: How are freedom of expression arguments being used against the right to organize for BDS? What are the new tactics being deployed against pro-Palestine advocates? What is the history of the claim that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic?

4.27 Hang out.

4.28 An East-West Divide on Europe’s Migrant Crisis: Responses and Narratives Watson Institute, 111 Thayer St // 2–3:30pm // free A lecture by Professor Jacque Rupnik of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris followed by a discussion of political beliefs in Eastern Europe regarding migration.

Why We Refuse: Conscientious Objectors and the Israeli Occupation Brown U, Barus & Holly 166 // 7.30pm // free Two Israelis, Khaled Farrag and Yasmin Yablonko, will discuss their refusal to serve Israel’s Occupation. Khaled will talk about Druze history and discuss the ways internal Israeli politics impact his community. Yasmin will talk about the refusal movement in Israel both past and present, and about the effects of militarism and mandatory military service on Israeli society.

Rhode Island Fact of the Week: After 15 dark years the capitol is reviving its sports teams. There have been notable developments in rugby.

LIST

LIST

LIST

4.24