The College Hill Independent V.27 N.4

the college hill independent .

October 4, 2013 : Volume 27 Issue 4 a Brown-RISD weekly

managing editors David Adler, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin news Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman, John White features Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan science Golnoosh Mahdavi, Jehane Samaha SPORTS Tristan Rodman interviews Drew Dickerson literary Edward Friedman EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Ka-

THE indy volume 27 #4

tia Zorich OCCULT Julieta Cárdenas X Lizzie Davis list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Robert Sandler Senior editors Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Sam Rosen, Robert Sandler Staff Writer Alex Sammon STAFF ILLUSTRATOR Aaron Harris web Houston Davidson Cover Art Casey Friedman mvP Josh Schenkkan P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 & theindy@gmail.com & @theindy_tweets & theindy.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org.

news fROM THE EDITORS October, it seems, is not going to be a good month. This insight comes—not from political trends or stock market predictions—from Susan Miller’s expert Twitter Miller—astrologist to the stars, with nine books under her belt, a column in 10 international fashion magazines, and over 160,000 Twitter followers—has been warning her followers of the dangers awaiting them in October for months.

In August, a follower worried about world events tweeted the seer, @astrologyzone, to ask if she was worried about the growing conflict with Syria. Not especially, Miller said, but she warned, “in October I have concerns about you and all my readers.”

Another follower asked Miller early last month, “Should I get a haircut?” Her reply: “Of course you can cut your hair now, but not in October (not if it is a radical change)! Trims are always OK!” Then, on October 1, an ominous message appeared on Miller’s website, astrologyzone.com: We’re Sorry...

The Astrology Zone site is currently down for maintenance.

We’ll be posting the October 2013 forecasts as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience!

-AstrologyZone.com IT Faithful readers, behold your fates.

October 1st to the 7th are particularly bad for signing things (leases in particular). Mercury is in retrograde from October 21st to November 10th; be wary during those days.

The weekend of the 11th to the 15th (a federal holiday, if there are still non-holidays for the Federal Government at that point) seems to be the only potential oasis, though Miller has warned that this period might only last from the 10th to the 14th, or the 11th and 12th.

Tread carefully, and keep your eyes glued to your phone for further updates. –EW

2 Week in Review sam rosen, alex sammon & emma wohl

5 Ice Ice Baby

FEATURES 8 Ride Til I Die josh schenkkan

13 Animal Sex indy staff

simon engler

METRO 3 ACA

FOOD 7 Diner 103 alex ronan

megan hauptman & kat thornton

ARTS 11 Album Art

SPORTS 17 No Pucking Way! madeline coburn

maya sorabjee

15 Walkways vera carothers

Science

X 18 Hoarders megan hauptman & emma wohl

9 Leftover Organs sandeep nayak & steph yin

e p h e m e r a : 12

katia zorich

week in last stands

by Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl & Sam Rosen Illustration by Maya Sorabjee

Taking a stand may be hard on your knees, but it means you can back up what you believe in, at least in the figurative sense. Because sometimes standing up actually means taking a stand. Plus, standing burns calories, and you hardly have to do anything. It’s cheating, like tofu ice cream.

Here, three standing-ups from the last week—and the best kind of standing-ups, the standingups that are final, fatal, the standings-up on which everything hangs. It’s the week in last stands.

BODY AND SOUL

LIGHTS OUT

LAST DRUG DEAL EVER

big tex is back.

on monday night, the us senate and House of Representatives played hot potato with spending legislation that would keep the federal government open the next day and beyond.

The atmosphere was tense in the House, and some representatives took to self-medicating their anxiety. October 2, Representative Alan Grayson (D-Florida) confirmed in an interview with Salon that some representatives had been drunk while voting the night before the shutdown. “It’s the usual suspects,” said Grayson.

Tipsy representatives must have wished the worst fates imaginable on Ted Cruz, currently the most visible Tea Party member of the Senate. The week before the shutdown, the Republican senator from Texas mounted a self-proclaimed “filibuster” in opposition to Obamacare, speaking for 21 hours. His plan? To convince the Senate to adopt a spending bill that would fund the federal government in exchange for stripping funding from the Affordable Care Act. In August, the Republican-backed bill passed in the House but was projected to fail in the Senate.

So Cruz took a stand and vowed to continue speaking until the Senate heard him. He quoted a Toby Keith song. He broke out his Darth Vader impression. He read “Green Eggs and Ham,” arguing that the American people “do not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”

When the time came to vote, Cruz’s colleagues quickly kicked him off the podium with a 79-19 vote and approved a spending bill that would not defund health care, 54 to 44.

Cruz is no Wendy Davis: the so-called “filibuster” did not delay proceedings at all. It was a stunt to gain attention for the speaker, who’s got his eyes on the White House in 2016. This sort of grandstanding is common for Cruz and his like-minded colleagues, and health care in particular gets their blood boiling. “They are literally offended by the idea that people would get the care they need to stay healthy or alive even though they can’t afford it,” Grayson said.

The two chambers failed to reconcile the two bills; on October 1, the Federal Government shut down for the first time in 17 years. 800,000 federal employees face furloughs, and a million more go to work without pay.

Cruz’s response to the shutdown, once it happened, was to blame the president. On Wednesday, Cruz took to Twitter to “#LetTheVetsIn” — slamming Obama for “imposing his destructive, far-left ideology” by closing the World War II Veterans’ Memorial and other monuments.

But all is not lost. The National Zoo tweeted Monday night that all the animals will still be fed and cared for. –EW

- “I’ve got the drugs…can you meet me at pizza place?”

The Texas State Fair opened this past week. With it came the debut of “Rebuilding Big Tex Body and Soul.” The film is a 22-minute biopic about the ruin and resurrection of the legendary 52-foot tall cowboy that stood watch over the fair for the past 60 years. Commissioned by the Dallas Morning News, the film features vignettes from Roger Staubach (famous Dallas Cowboy) and other iconic Texans, all of whom agree that Big Tex is more than just a cowboy: “Big Tex is Dallas.”

From 1952 to 2012, Big Tex stood as the sentry of the State Fair, which opens on the last Saturday of every September. Tex was born as a 49-foot tall papier-mâché Santa Claus made to attract holiday shoppers to Kerens, a Dallas suburb.

But after two years, he was purchased by then-State Fair President/Dallas Mayor R.L. Thornton, who would pull him from the roadside into the spotlight. Doffing his red robes for a flannel shirt and a cowboy hat, Tex soon picked up a corporate sponsorship (from Lee Dungarees, and then Dickies). In a few short years, he established himself as an indelible figure in Texas state lore.

But, on October 19, 2012, tragedy struck when an electrical fire set Big Tex ablaze. Fair-goers could do nothing but look on in horror as Tex burned helplessly to the ground.

Documentarian Tom Ford referred to the subsequent days as “a vigil—mourners brought flowers, said prayers, and shed many a tear over Tex’s charred remains.”

Pulling itself up by its bootstraps (as Texans are wont to do), the city rebounded by commissioning an engineering firm for “Operation Fried Chicken,” a top-secret mission to resurrect Tex. Though the blueprint remains classified, the clandestine operation yielded a Super Tex—steel frame, blinking eyelids, a moving, speaking mouth, and, of course, an intricate fire suppression system—to the tune of $500,000. A beautification process (Tex’s size 96 shoes can’t shine themselves) is slated to cost an additional $600,000.

Putting Tex back together represented an even greater challenge. In the dead of night on September 10, Tex’s various appendages were transported to a secret workshop for assembly, each truck taking a unique route as to avoid being tailed by ardent enthusiasts.

New Tex, a full three feet taller and 19,000 pounds heavier (in keeping with the contemporary American demographic), was scheduled for reveal September 27. However, no white sheet could contain the 55-foot monolith—a gust of wind blew his cover a day early.

No matter—Big Tex is as American as small government (or no government), and if there’s anything we can agree upon, it’s the imperative nature of big, bad, flame retardant Americana.

Most important of all, Big Tex stands. –AS

OCTOBER 04 2013

- “You have the right to remain silent…”

- “Lol stfu see you soon.”

We’re all adults here, so let’s just get the details out of the way. Nicholas Delear Jr. is a 33-year-old man who sells pot in Sparta, New Jersey. Earlier this week Delear was arranging a transaction via his cell phone, and he accidentally texted a local detective instead of his client. Delear, to his credit, became suspicious when an undercover police offer met him at a nearby pizza parlor and tried to initiate a transaction. He fled, but was quickly apprehended, and a police dog found a quarter pound of marijuana in his car.

Before you get too smug, let’s pause to recognize how impossibly slim the chances are of accidentally texting a cop when you’re trying to set up a drug deal. Delear did not goof up and text his stepmother, or his boy Fitz, or any of the numbers that are actually in his contacts. He dialed a sevendigit sequence that he had never before dialed in his life, and it happened to be the worst possible number he could have dialed. The 2010 United States Census reports that the population of Sparta, NJ is around 19,722 souls. Of those, there can’t be more than 300 police officers—and that seems like a generous estimate. So Delear had a roughly .015 percent chance of texting a cop before you even factor in the permutations and combinations of seven digit phone numbers within a fixed area code. It boggles the fucking mind.

It’s so easy to picture: Delear Jr., lying on the couch watching “Chopped,” brushing Cool Ranch Dorito crumbs off of his Devils sweatshirt and trying to remember how long ago he put his chicken nuggets in the oven. Confused by the unfamiliar visual planes of iOS 7, he tries to type the number of one of his clients. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, he’s maybe just one number off. If that number is a 1 or a 7 instead of a 4, the text goes to some Geology major at Monmouth or a retired actuary and, yeah, Delear has a little egg on his face, but he doesn’t go to jail. It’s not Scarface in the hot tub, or Pablo Escobar running from the Colombian police, because those things aren’t nearly as statistically epic as Nicholas Delear Jr., on his cell phone, ending his drug-dealing career in the most improbable way we’ll ever see. –SR

NEws █ 03

affordable october 1 has come like the prophesied year 2000 in old Technicolor cartoons, the age of Obamacare is no longer in the distant future. On October 1, state-run and federal health insurance marketplaces will open. These are cyber marketplaces that aim to consolidate health insurance plans into a user-friendly website so that individuals will be able to find the best healthcare coverage for them based on their employer, income, and premium constraints.

In Rhode Island, that site is HealthSourceRI.com. Open the site and you’ll see a big picture of a smiling child, a couple and their infant, or an elderly woman grinning from ear to ear. The design is inviting, easing, comforting—and doesn’t make you think about premiums just yet. “Live healthy and rest easy with the right plan,” the HealthSourceRI splash page encourages. The federal site, which states can use if they opt not to develop their own, is called Healthcare.gov. It’s nearly identical to Rhode Island’s in format. On the homepage there is a ticker counting the days left until March 31, 2014, when open enrollment for health insurance plans comes to a close and individuals will incur a fee if they cannot provide proof of health insurance coverage.

State healthcare bureaucrats are proud of HealthSourceRI. “Our exchange is actually more advanced than other states,” Health Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Hittner said. It wasn’t necessary for Rhode Island to create its own exchange—states have the option to adopt the federal website.

In fact, only 14 states have created their own exchange site to date.

The website will be anchored by a physical office and call center where individuals, insurance brokers, or employers can phone in questions about health insurance. The center is located along the interstate railroad tracks at 70 Royal Little Drive, near the Stop and Shop and Savers in the north end of Providence.

In the first hour of opening, HealthSourceRI’s physical office had two visitors sitting in two of the four on-site consulting rooms. Various employees and workers walked around the blue-walled lobby with clean glass tables and padded sea green chairs to fix the window blinds and set up stands for informational brochures. Although the front door misleadingly

read, “Optum,” an analytics company formerly housed at 70 Royal Little Drive, inside the metallic sign for “HealthSourceRI” was in plain sight. That same morning, HealthsourceRI. com temporarily crashed, reportedly due to too much traffic (don’t worry, it’s back now).

The exchange also launched a television ad on September 30. While perhaps not as hWumorous as the Oregon exchange ads, which rose to online acclaim with their spotlight on young, flannel-wearing guitarists, the Rhode Island ad is nonetheless feisty and “very unique to Rhode Island,” Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Roberts said. The video shows scenes from the American revolution, a painting of the HMS Gaspee, the ship that John Brown and other colonists burned down in protest of British law, and images of manufacturing plants. The narrator, in a voice fit for a movie trailer, says, “We are Rhode Island, and we have a history of leading the way.

Now, let’s do it with healthcare.” +++ rhode island has been preparing for this kind of healthcare reform for over twenty years, according to Roberts, who was in office alongside former governor Donald Carcieri in 2008 when the Affordable Care Act passed.

In 2004, Roberts helped bring about the creation of the state office of the Health Insurance Commissioner. The office, which exists only in Rhode Island, oversees the premiums health insurance companies place on their plans. Each year, the health insurance company proposes their own increase in insurance premiums, and the Health Insurance Commissioner, using cost projections calculated by a team of actuaries, judges whether the increase is plausible and fair to both the customer and the provider.

The office was created shortly after charges of corruption were levied against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the state’s largest provider of individual insurance plans. In 2003, John Celona, then a North Providence state senator and the chairman of the Senate Corporations Committee, was charged with accepting bribes from officials at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, CVS, and Roger Williams Hospital.

In response, the federal government launched an investigation into broader state corruption. “Operation Dollar Bill,” as it

RHODE ISLAND

was called, focused on between seven and a dozen (sources vary) local corporations and politicians. The result was a jail sentence for Celona, the dismissal of several executives at Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Roger Williams Medical Center, and a $20 million fine for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode IslandW (which health care premium hikes would not be allowed to make up for). At the time, the board of Blue Cross Blue Shield was internally nominated. Now, one-third of their board must be publicly appointed, Roberts said.

In the shadow of state corruption, Roberts said she worked with a group of more than 200 local volunteers to raise support for health insurance reform through community meetings and semi-successful legislative packages (successful items included things that established the “nuts and bolts” of health care reform, like a pay claims database, Roberts said).

Carcieri was not in support of healthcare reform, but Governor Lincoln Chafee, who entered the seat of the governor in 2011, gave Roberts and local activists the go-ahead to prepare for the implementation of Obamacare.

October 1 was “the big expansion of access,” Roberts said. But she said the biggest dates are now behind us, like the law that extended the age that children could stay on their parents’ insurance, and the ban on insurance companies dropping coverage on a person should they develop an illness or have pre-existing condition. The market is open—now only time will tell what customers will do with it.

KAT THORNTON B’14 is shopping for answers.

2004: Rhode Island created the office of the Health Care Commissioner, with Chris Koller at its head. This is the first state office of its kind, nationally.

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 20

NATIONAL 03 █ METRO

June 28, 2010: The Supreme Court votes 5-4 for the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act., but overturns the mandated national Medicaid expansion.

States can decide individually whether to extend Medicaid coverage to people exempt from the private insurance mandate.

March 23, 2010: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

care act BEYOND HEALTHSOURCE “marketplace isn’t really a word that translates well into other languages,” says Channavy Chhay, Executive Director for the Center for Southeast Asians (CSEA), a state-wide organization that provides comprehensive social services to Asian immigrants in Rhode Island. “People hear marketplace, they think about going to a physical market.” Marketplace is the word that many politicians and policy wonks have used to describe the new online health insurance exchanges that opened October 1. “There have been so many names for this new health care,” chimes in Xong Dong, a Program Director at CSEA. “First it was Obamacare, then the Affordable Care Act, then HealthSource. People are confused.”

It’s complicated enough trying to understand the intricacies and procedures for enrolling in a health care plan if you speak English as your first language, but language and cultural barriers make the process infinitely more difficult.

That’s where organizations like CSEA come in. “We want our community to be enrolled and informed,” says Chhay. “There are a lot of language and cultural barriers [to enrolling in an insurance plan]. Our organization fills that void.”

Dong and Chhay’s sentiments are reflected in nationwide polling data on general confusion over what exactly is happening with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There have been so many attempted repeal votes in the House of Representatives that many people believe that the ACA has been vetoed. “We’ve still got more than 40 percent of the American people who think that the law may have been repealed by the Congress or overturned by the Supreme Court or just don’t know,” says Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been conducting polls about the ACA since 2010. This general confusion over the politics of the healthcare reforms is compounded by the difficulty of community-level outreach to inform and enroll people in the soon-to-be mandatory health care. +++ csea is one of 11 community organizations (in addition to eight state health centers) that will provide one-on-

by Megan Hauptman & Kat Thornton Timeline by Casey Friedman

one, in-person health care enrollment assistance through a state-sponsored community navigator program. The navigator program, which is funded by HealthSourceRI, is contracted out to and run by the Rhode Island Health Center Association (RIHCA), which operates several low-cost health centers across the state.

Currently, RIHCA’s eight health centers serve approximately 40,000 uninsured patients, which is a little less than a third of the total estimated 128,000 uninsured Rhode Islanders. All of thWese 128,000 Rhode Islanders theoretically need to be enrolled on some form of health insurance by January 2014 to avoid a penalty tax, but many people either don’t understand this new mandate or will have trouble enrolling based on language, cultural or technological barriers.

That’s the impetus for the community navigator program, which seeks to “reach out to all corners of Rhode Island” according to Jane Hayward, President of RIHCA. Partnering with community groups allows RIHCA to take advantage of the organizations’ language skills, outreach abilities, and existing social service infrastructure.

RIHCA has already begun training employees from the community groups to work as navigators and begin providing services this week. The idea is to teach people with existing community ties about new health insurance options so that they can then counsel the groups they work with and offer one-on-one enrollment assistance. In addition to CSEA, the groups providing this navigator service include the Providence Community Libraries, the John Hope Settlement House (refugee services), Latino Public Radio, Amos House (support services for formerly and currently homeless people), and the Providence Center (substance abuse recovery centers). +++ some of these organizations serve populations particularly in need of healthcare coverage, many of which will be covered under the Rhode Island Medicaid expansion, which also kicks into action this January. The Affordable Care Act mandates that everyone be enrolled in an insurance plan by 2014, but several exemptions exist—if you are homeless, in jail, recently bankrupt, or living below the poverty line, you are not subject to the tax penalty. In Rhode Island, if you cannot afford to

July 15, 2013: HealthSourceRI announced as the Rhode Island state health care exchange.

September 24, 2013: Rhode Island Health Center Association announces the upcoming launch of their community navigator program.

enroll in one of the low-cost insurance options, you most likely qualify for the state-wide expansion of Medicaid.

Amos House, off of Broad Street in South Providence, houses a shelter, soup kitchen, and job training programs.

“We are in the midst of a community where there is tremendous unemployment and poverty, where many people don’t have health insurance,” Eileen Hayes, Amos House’s President and CEO, told the Independent in a phone interview. One employee from the organization has been trained as a navigator and will soon begin assisting people to sign up for healthcare through HealthSource. Hayes hopes that the new healthcare options will allow more people who Amos House works with access to preventative care, rather than relying on the Emergency Room as their primary care provider. She sees access to stable healthcare as one of the first steps for people trying to move on to stable housing and employment. “One of the reasons that many people who are homeless can’t get stability in their lives is a lack of access to health care, especially mental health services.”

Owen Heleen, Chief Strategy Officer for The Providence Center, echoes Hayes’ sentiment: “Getting access to mental health or substance abuse treatment when uninsured is difficult.” He sees the new insurance mandates as “a big win for all of our clients.” Heleen hopes that access to affordable healthcare and the Medicaid expansion will make it possible for more people to afford and enroll in mental health or substance abuse treatment and reduce some of the stigma that many people face. The Providence Center has already sent three employees to be trained as navigators by RIHCA, and is planning on training three more soon; the navigators will move between their 14 service locations throughout the state.

Despite his enthusiasm for the new insurance exchange, Heleen wasn’t entirely sure what the future would look like when we spoke on September 30th. “Buying health insurance is complex. The new system allows people to actually compare apples to apples, because the plans have to have common elements, but I am not positive everything is going to work perfectly at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We all need to be patient.”

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 is kind of patient.

January 1, 2015: Starting January 1st, Rhode Island has to pick up the cost of continuing to run Health Source RI, which will cost the state between $17.9 million and $23.9 million a year, according to Christine Ferguson, the director of Health Source.

010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 October 1, 2013: The date health care exchanges launch, nationwide (thus leaving 3 months before people should have found an insurance plan). This is also the date by which large companies must have sent notices to their employees regarding their health care coverage and how it complies (or doesn’t comply) with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

OCTOBER 04 2013

January 1, 2014: The date that all US citizens will have to have health insurance, or else incur a fee of $95 or 1% of your income, whichever amounts to more. This is also the day when it will be officially illegal for health insurance companies to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition or to charge more because of health or gender.

January 1, 2015: Fee for not having health insurance increases to $325 or 2% of your income, whichever amounts to more.

January 1, 2016: Fee for not having health insurance increases to $695 or 2.5% of your income, whichever amounts to more.

METRO █ 04

COLD WATER Shipping in the Arctic

the earliest satellite photographs of the Arctic in summer date to 1978.

From above, the ice extends to the fingered rim of Siberia.

It stretches across Greenland. It locks Canada’s northern islands into place.

The progression of the following years is a familiar one: The ice recedes slowly, creakily, at a rate of about 3.7 percent per decade. Around the cap appears a band of darker blue, melted seawater, sloshing in the channel between the freeze and the rocky brown of a barren coast.

The camera fails us here, but imagination serves just as well. Zoom in. Zoom in to the blue band, to the place where there once was ice and now, in late summer and early fall, there is water. Zoom in until you see a tanker—huge, white, fat—crawling across the Arctic sea. This boat is operated by Hyundai Glovis, the South Korean logistics company. It is en route from St. Petersburg to Gwangyang, in South Korea, where it will arrive around October 17. Its belly is full of naphtha, a liquefied fossil fuel similar to gasoline. The Hyundai tanker is on its first Arctic voyage. It is traveling on water where there once was ice. It is traveling along the northern coast of Siberia, near the shrinking top of the world, with a hold full of hydrocarbon.

“There’s a higher risk associated with shipping in the Arctic than anywhere else,” Malte Humpert, executive director of the Arctic Institute, an Arctic policy think-tank, told the Independent. Visibility is poor in the Arctic, Humpert said. Accurate depth charts don’t yet exist for the entire region. Ocean spray accumulates and freezes on ships, damaging important instruments. The days are short. And then, of course, there are icebergs.

On September 5, the Russian tanker Nordvik collided with an ice floe in the Kara Sea, north of central Siberia. At the time of the collision, all 453 feet of the Nordvik were filled to the brim with diesel fuel. Sailors quickly plugged the hole in the side of the Nordvik with a block of cement, and the boat drifted until it was picked up by another vessel and helped back to port.

The Nordvik did not sink. It did not capsize. Its sailors did not drown. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel did not spill into the Arctic sea. There was no human tragedy, no ecological disaster.

The warning shot was quiet. It did not hurt. It will likely be ignored.

+++

the nature of accident rules out prediction. It is possible to speak, however, of risks increasing and risks decreasing.

Risks are increasing in the Arctic. More and more ships are sailing the entirety of the northern route each year. 2012 saw 46 complete voyages. That’s a fourfold increase from 2010 levels. And hundreds more boats make partial journeys along the coast each year.

More ships, and a route that in the next few years will not become any safer. In fact, it might just become more dangerous. The Arctic Institute’s Humpert told the Independent that Arctic shipping conditions “may get worse in the short term due to ice melting.” That’s because ice melting means ice floating, ice hiding—ice waiting to puncture the hull of a ship carrying sensitive cargo.

It’s true that the northern route carries only a tiny percentage of the world’s seaborne commerce. The Suez Canal carries thousands of times more ships per year. But when each vessel is traveling so close to the top of the world, so far from help, the stakes of an accident become extremely high. “The remoteness of the area,” Natasha Brown, of the International Maritime Organization, wrote in an email to the Independent, “makes rescue or clean up operations difficult and costly.”

Brown’s comment is an understatement. The Nordvik drifted for more than a week before help arrived.

the first commercial trans-arctic voyage, from South Korea to Rotterdam, was completed in 2009. Since that year, the trip has been manageable only during the summer season, when the ice recedes—and even then, conditions are harsh.

Tankers need to be equipped with special instruments, double hulls, and icebreaker escorts to travel the route safely. This makes the Arctic route difficult and expensive. But for major carriers, like Hyundai Glovis, the costs are well worth it.

Shipping across the Arctic is an exercise in cynical foresight. More than 20 percent of the world’s exploitable oil and gas reserves are located north of the Arctic Circle. When the ice finally recedes enough to render those resources accessible, the quickest way to bring them to market will be via the overseas routes north of Siberia. Shipping over the Arctic can shave 10 days from the traditional Europe-Asia route, via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal. It is, by far, the fastest route from Northern Europe to Asia. But its profitable use demands preparation.

Governments and shipping corporations are chomping at the bit. The South Korean government is so keen on developing the northern route that it will soon reimburse South Korean freighters for up to half of the port fees they incur along the way. China, too, is encouraging exploration in the region: in August, the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) sent a 19,000-ton container ship from Dalian, in northeastern China, to Rotterdam, over the Arctic. And the Barents Observer reports that Sovcomflot, a state-owned Russian carrier, now offers transit on the northern route for nearly half of the year.

To travel the Arctic route now, to develop the expertise needed for difficult northern voyages years in advance—this will allow major carriers to be the first to benefit when the melting time, inevitably, is here. +++ there’s an obvious and distressing irony in the shipment of fossil fuels across a melting pole. But the greatest problems associated with Arctic transport are more immediate. Despite the warming trend, shipping in the Arctic is plain dangerous—and it’s dangerous on every voyage.

06 █ NEWS

by Simon Engler Illustration by Andres Chang

+++

+++ eleven million gallons of oil poured out of the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

This figure does not demonstrate the likely magnitude of a disaster in the Arctic. Ships of the Valdez’s size are too large to attempt the Northern Sea Route.

Nor does it indicate that history will repeat itself. The Valdez ran aground a few hours after leaving port. Ice and isolation were not involved. Accidents in the Arctic, if there are any, will look different.

The Valdez wasn’t in the Arctic, but it tells us about the Arctic. It tells us about the Arctic because it was a marine accident to which a minimum of emergency crews responded relatively quickly—and because it was devastating nevertheless. Five skimming boats began removing oil within 24 hours of the Valdez spill. There were ports and landing strips

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

relatively nearby. Even so, only ten percent of the 11 million gallons of oil lost were ever cleaned up.

That’s a rate of success that cannot be expected in areas of deeper isolation. Up north, above Siberia, the necessary infrastructure—the landing strips for dispersal planes, the lodgings for emergency crews, the fuel depots—does not exist. This means that even the small number of tankers on the Northern Sea Route pose a devastating threat. If there ever is an accident in the north, there will be very little anyone can do about it, at least in the short term.

“If you run aground, if there’s an oil spill, if two ships collide, you’re always thousands of miles away from the nearest coast guard or shipping center,” Humpert told the Independent. “For those six, seven, eight thousand miles along the Northern Sea Route, you’re by yourself.” +++ accidents can be prevented, or they can be responded to, accommodated, cleaned up.

Prevention makes sense when the likelihood of a disaster is as high as its potential consequences. It makes sense when prevention is as cheap as the risks are high. For example: We put out the embers of a fire at a dry campground. We install speed bumps near the elementary school.

But prevention requires action—here, now, and indefinitely. Prevention is exhausting. It is especially exhausting when the rewards come only fifty times per year, in the blind spot at the top of the globe. And prevention is expensive.

To promise a response is, in such situations, a tempting alternative. +++ on may 15, member-states of the Arctic Council—an international group composed of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—signed an Agreement on Cooperation on Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response in the Arctic. The Agreement is the first binding international code to specifically treat ecological emergency management in Arctic waters.

At first glance, the document reads like a promise. The Agreement lays out the terms of coordinated response to oil disasters. It explains the plan for reimbursing the costs of assistance. It calls for joint training exercises. It asks each signatory to maintain a logistical “system for responding promptly and effectively to oil pollution incidents.”

But the Agreement lacks specificity. Signatories pledge only to provide for “a minimum level of…oil spill combating equipment.” They submit to training the “relevant personnel.”

They swear to “mobilize the necessary resources” in response to a disaster. And though the document reiterates the preexisting emergency response systems of the individual signatories, common standards for oil clean up are not established.

OCTOBER 04 2013

This ambiguity serves to accommodate signatories’ inability to meet any provisions of actual stringency. According to the Barents Observer, David Balton, a State Department representative present at the Agreement meetings, commented that the United States is “not fully ready to do what is necessary” in response to an Arctic emergency. “I suspect we’re not alone in this,” Balton said. “We are hoping that the signing of this agreement will be the prompt to be ready.”

Ambiguities cannot prompt because they are unenforceable. More than that, ambiguities provoke questions: When?

Where? And if an accident occurs beyond our reach, at the top of the world—how? +++ prevention is an alternative to response.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a specialized agency of the UN charged with creating regulatory systems for global shipping, is currently developing an agreement to outline specific safety procedures for vessels in Arctic and Antarctic waters.

The agreement, known as the Polar Code, will provide regulations regarding ship construction, operational safety, and environmental risk mitigation. Think requirements for hull thickness, crew training in ice safety, and storage materials designed for cold weather. At press time, an IMO working group is meeting in London to work on a draft. Once the Code is ratified, it will be up to signatory states to enforce its provisions.

But ratification of the Polar Code will be a long process.

“Depending on progress,” the IMO’s Natasha Brown wrote in an email to the Independent, “the draft Code could be referred on to the main committees…later in 2014.” After that, there’s the incorporation of the Code into the existing laws governing maritime activity. According to Brown, the Code could enter into force in 2016 or 2017.

The Polar Code will offer prevention. But prevention, unlike response, cannot be promised for the future. Prevention means nothing when it is not in force. Before Arctic nations agree to a Polar Code, before ships begin to follow the rules, before stringent safety standards are adopted—before any of this, there will still be dozens of tankers filled with oil and gas travelling from Asia to Europe along the coast of Siberia each summer. +++ there is no arctic boom, not yet.

It will be 40 or 50 or 60 years before the region is entirely ice-free in the summer, before a ship can sail over a liquid North Pole from Europe to Asia.

For now, Hyundai’s tanker travels the narrow blue band between the ice and an empty coast, eager.

SIMON ENGLER B’14 puts out the embers of a fire at a dry campground.

NEWS █ 07

Every night, without fail, Harry Rosen goes out to dinner. Nice restaurants, New York City. Always gets the fish.

He’s one-oh-three, but don’t bother asking. He always says he’s ninety.

Sitting by himself, people from tables nearby tend to strike up conversation. But if he shares his real age, “it becomes the whole subject of conversation and it makes it look like I’m looking for attention, which I’m not.”

He lives alone in a studio on West 57th Street. His wife of seventy years, Lillian, died five years ago. She was ninety-five. Now that she’s gone, he rarely eats at home.

Harry’s got hearing loss, but is otherwise healthy. In the late afternoon, he puts on a suit, hails a cab, and heads out.

Information on the life and times of Harry Rosen courtesy of the New York Times.

But all these years and years, how did he do it? “I read in a newspaper column a long time ago that the key to a long life is sleeping on your back, so I always did that.”

GRAND THEFT AUTO V GRAND THEFT AUTO V GRAND THEFT AUTO V GRAND THEFT AUTO V GRAND THEFT AUTO V

by Josh Schenkkan I. i’m ten years old, and I’m driving an SUV through the unnamed alleys of an unnamed industrial district. I can hear the gravel and glass crunch underneath my tires as I pull up next to a group of prostitutes, all wearing identical bra-and-garter get-ups. One of them leans into the car, and I think that she might smell like sweat and cigarettes, but I can’t be sure. After exchanging a few words, the prostitute gets into my car, and we drive around the corner where the car begins to rock back and forth on its luxury suspensions. Approximately 30 seconds later, she climbs out of the car, and I stick an automatic machine gun through the passenger window. The first burst of fire tears through her tiny body in an almost-certainly fatal way, but just to be sure, I climb out of the car and unload the rest of my clip into the pool of blood and viscera. She leaves a neat pile of cash next to her—$13—that I pocket. I pause for a moment, waiting for sirens that never come, and by the time I’ve done so, the prostitute’s body has disappeared into the pavement. I climb back into the car, en-route to purchase more ammunition, when my mom calls me for dinner. I save and turn off Grand Theft Auto III, and go upstairs to eat.

II. last week, almost exactly 12 years later, the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto franchise debuted as the most successful entertainment launch in history. In the first three days of its release, GTA V grossed over a billion dollars; it took the fastest selling movies in history—The Avengers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Avatar—19 days to reach the same number.

To put it another way, GTA V surpassed in three days the approximate GDP of Somalia, or the total value of the black market firearms trade. People paid more money in less time for Grand Theft Auto than any other entertainment property in the history of entertainment.

In response to sales, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of GTA V publisher Take-Two Interactive said, “Grand Theft Auto is a cultural phenomenon.”

III. i grew up with the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The poster for Grand Theft Auto III was among the first posters I put on my wall; the soundtracks for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City were the first box set I ever purchased. I loved the immersiveness of the worlds, the colorfulness of the characters, the freedom that I felt as Claude, or Tommy Vercetti, or CJ Johnson, or Niko Bellic.

But as I began to play through the latest installment, I felt a little sick. Despite having played these games throughout my childhood, the idea of my 11-year-old self driving around Los Santos made me uncomfortable—blowing heads off of pedestrians, soliciting prostitutes, the whole GTA project. Still, I struggled to come up with a reason why this was happening now, after over a decade of carnage.

The easy answer, and the one I turned to first, was the violence.

Following the release of every Grand Theft Auto, parents and journalists have asked the question: is Grand Theft Auto making our children more violent? And every year, researchers have answered: no, not really. In 2001, psychologists at the University of Iowa concluded that there was no conclusive link between violent video games—or violent media more generally—and actual violence or criminality. In May 2013, a study from Texas A&M pronounced that the only predictors of actual violence were genetic predisposition and upbringing; violent video games did not factor into a child’s development of violent tendencies.

I think, though, that our impulse is to say that these games do something. There is a discomfort when you imagine your niece or nephew or younger sibling decapitating a migrant worker or beating an old woman to death with a dildo, despite the studies concluding that it isn’t causing them to do these things in real life.

OCTOBER 04 2013

Maybe it’s the realization that, even in this very virtual set of circumstances, children are capable of, and willing to participate in, tremendous cruelty and violence—even if they’re also capable of separating that virtual violence from real-world violence. It’s a virtual version of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a reminder that perhaps the only thing that separates sadism from normality is a pair of mirrored sunglasses and a wooden baton.

IV. i’m fourteen years old. It’s after midnight; I’ve just broken up with my first girlfriend, so I’m taking a drive through an unknown national park in San Andreas. The pickup truck creaks and bounces when it hits a divot in the road, and the wheels kick up a large cloud of dust. I don’t think I like country music, but since I’m in a pickup truck in the woods, I switch to the country music station just as Mary-Beth Maybell announces that it’s “Three Cigarettes in the Ashtray” by Patsy Cline. I stop the car to listen, leaving the engine running. The next song is “Crazy” by Willie Nelson, after that is “Always Wanting You” by Merle Haggard, and I’m still parked. There is something resonant in the music that I’ve never noticed before, something that suddenly, and permanently, becomes a part of my sonic memory.

Scenes like these remind us that Grand Theft Auto is about more than violence. It is about texture, and it is in these moments of texture that the game bleeds into our consciousness, into our everyday life. It is these moments of reality—a Patsy Cline song, a midnight drive—before the inherent hyper-reality of the Grand Theft Auto universe that make the game so unique and so discomfiting.

I asked my friends, all of whom had purchased GTA V, what their most significant memories of the game were, and they were just that: holistic memories, memories with depth.

Grand Theft Auto is the sound of a blind being pulled shut, a door being locked. It is the temporarily vivid footprints made in blood on concrete, it is the vibration of a machine gun–controller. They are memories that really do blur the distinction between reality and virtual reality, for a large part of this generation.

Grand Theft Auto is, of course, tremendously violent, but it is also more than this violence; it is a piece of our collective imagination whose influence is farther reaching than just violence or morality or development, even if we can’t quite pinpoint what the consequences of that influence are. Grand Theft Auto is pervasive, and based on its sales this week, will only become more so. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be scared. Becoming texture, it is possible, is worse than the block-shapes of a PS1 that made virtual reality feel so far away.

V. perhaps the reason why the discussions of the violence in Grand Theft Auto feel so staid is because there is a widespread acceptance that children will gain exposure to it regardless. There’s a thread on Reddit in which video game store clerks post their funniest stories about underage kids trying to purchase Grand Theft Auto—almost all involve tearful tempertantrums at the register—but any game that inspires such desire is something that they will eventually find. Teenagers don’t stop trying to buy a six-pack just because the first person outside the liquor store refuses to buy it for them. Just like watching pornography, or doing drugs, or drinking alcohol, Grand Theft Auto just seems to appear in adolescence. So, it’s hard.

For my generation, what Grand Theft Auto does is almost moot because it’s already doing, or has already done, it. For the next, though, we should really think about what the game might do, or what the game might leave. Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe it’s something so subtle we just haven’t noticed it yet.

JOSH SCHENKKAN B’14 is still trying to find someone to buy him a six-pack.

FEATURES █ 08

vestigia

by Steph Yin and Sandeep Nayak

We were born and grew up in the briny blue, and even when we evolved to invade land, we never left the sea. We just brought it with us in our blood. Now the briny red bathes our innards. In evolution, function follows form. Each change occurs and can only occur on the substrate of those that came before it. Slowly the swim bladders of our marine past have been repurposed into lungs, while our gills and tails have receded, relegated only to the early stages of the embryo. As Mr. Darwin noted, “Organs or parts in this strange condition, bearing the stamp of inutility, are extremely common throughout nature.”

This stamp of inutility is the stamp of history. We are our creation incarnate, and vestigia are evolution’s clearest examples. These “useless” organs are not the failures of an idiotic design process, rather champions that have served their functions and now bask in retirement. Vestigia are clues to what we were, cues to be attentive to origins.

Let’s explore. +++

Goosebumps

This is an easy one. Each of our hairs is attached to an arrector pili muscle, which can constrict to straighten the hair. Our mammal cousins use this to exaggerate their size in situations of fear or dominance display. The effect on a chimpanzee or cat is impressive. Alternatively, if it’s very cold the arrectores pilorum can make hair stand up to create a layer of insulation.

Yet even the hairiest of humans don’t have enough hair for either of these functions. All we get instead is an impotent rippling of gooseflesh.

Vitamin C Pathway

We’re always hearing about the benefits of vitamin C. Oh, you’re sick? Better load up on some vitamin C. Pull on sweatpants, pop some Airborne or Emergen-C in your water bottle and listen to “Graduation” to remind you that you and your besties will be friends forever. Chug. Repeat. But wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to constantly supplement our diets with pills and fizzy drinks?

Most animals synthesize their own vitamin C. Notable exceptions include capybaras—the world’s largest rodents— and humans. If we don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, we grow morose, our teeth fall out, spots bloom across our skin and bleeding, pus-filled wounds erupt on our bodies This figures unexpectedly in colonial history. Colonizing scum can only travel so far before they die of scurvy. Introducing agriculture to South Africa gave Dutch sailors access to fresh

09 █ SCIENCE

fruits and veggies, a vitamin C pit stop on the way to maraud the East Indies. In fact, the chemical name for vitamin C, ascorbic acid, literally means “lack of scurvy” (in Latin, scurvy is “scorbutus”).

We actually have broken remnants of vitamin C synthesis machinery in our DNA. The gene is there—it just no longer works. Why have we abandoned this valuable pathway? Why put ourselves at the mercy of citrus and kale?

For one, Vitamin C synthesis produces hydrogen peroxide—a reactive oxygen species that harms cells. By getting vitamin C from external sources, humans can avoid cell damage that results from synthesis. Moreover, we use vitamin C as a nutritional thermostat: when we don’t get enough of it, our bodies turn on the same system activated when we lack oxygen. Loss of vitamin C synthesis possibly helped our ancestors survive malaria, which has killed half of all humans.

Vitamin C also counters the obesogenic quality of sugar; losing it might have helped our ancestors fatten up in scarce times.

Pinnae Reflex

When a cat swivels its eyes to attend to something, its ears follow. The cat has a reflex circuit that ties eye movements to the auricular muscles of the ear, allowing audition to track vision. Humans have the same muscles, though they are now entirely useless, save for some freaks who can wiggle them a bit. While these muscles do absolutely nothing, the reflex circuit is preserved.

Try it yourself: place your index fingers behind your ears, approximately behind the bony outgrowths of your mastoid processes. Now move your eyes vigorously from left to right.

Feel that? That’s the slight twinge of incompetent muscles trying to budge.

Wisdom Teeth ( Third Molars)

Wisdom teeth removal is a shitty ordeal. For this hapless reporter, my gums refused to clot, so post-surgery I spent the day gobbing blood into a sink. Even after my platelets got their act together, the tender sinkholes that remained turned out to be especially effective food traps. My tongue grew stiff from excavating.

“Wisdom” teeth are teeth that no longer fit in our shrunken heads. Sure, dentists love the extra business, but why would the Creator have crammed so many teeth into a mouth so small? One explanation is the brain/jaw trade-off.

Huge jaws are good for grinding leaves but not for housing a large brain. Which accommodated the other? Did the jaw suddenly shrink and the brain expand in the vacuum? Or did the growing brain force the jaw to compact?

Some pin it on mushy foods. When humans invented cooking and no longer had to chow down on bloody sinew, raw roots, and tough seeds, the premium on brawny jaws disappeared.This theory is supported in part by regional variations in jaw size and wisdom teeth prevalence—in some places where diets still include a lot of raw, tough foods, jaws tend to be larger and wisdom teeth more often develop normally.

What about dental hygiene itself? Before Sensodyne© and twice-yearly visits to the dentist, our ancestors would lose many of their chompers by puberty. For them, an extra set of understudies that erupted at the beginning of adulthood probably came in handy. Now that most of us can practice dental hygiene and keep our teeth in working order, these back-up molars just get in the way.

Palmar Grasp Reflex

Imagine a baby who having braved congenital malformations or medical malpractice emerges premature, battered yet alive, improbably miraculous. And the father who’d secretly harbored regrets all the while sees his newborn and places his finger into the baby’s impossibly tiny hand, and the hand squeezes in reply! The father swoons as he realizes he is witnessing a nascent will, the first volitional act of his progeny.

The poor sap doesn’t realize that this is nothing more than the palmar grasp reflex, to which premature infants are more susceptible. It is a holdover from the days of yore when our ancestor’s mothers were covered in body hair. The grasp reflex was useful in that it allowed infants to clutch on as their mothers ambled about the treetops. Nowadays, a baby relying on the same safety net would just make a feeble grasp at his mother’s waxed arms then plummet to the linoleum.

This reflex can recur in elderly individuals suffering from dementia and stroke patients who will involuntarily grab at whatever graces the surface of their palm. It is a clinical sign that bodes poorly.

Vomeronasal Organ

The vomeronasal organ (VNO) is the most elusive vestige on this list. For animals in which it is fully functioning, the VNO is a pair of tubes located at the base of the nose that primarily detects pheromones. We know for sure that it is present in human embryos. The question is whether, like our tails, they telescope as we mature.

Studies of the adult VNO have been erratic, with yeti-like variations in description of location, size, and even existence. These debates rage on with particular zest because the VNO’s existence is linked to the unresolved question of whether humans are sending each other a whole suite of co-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

vert social and sexual cues. These pheromones operate beyond our immediate senses, potentially shaping our attractions, moods, and basic bodily functions. We don’t know how large of a role these invisible chemicals play in our lives. While some may find it romantic to be governed by primal instincts, control freaks among us might revel in the thought that we exert more agency over our behaviors than most other mammals. Our strongest evidence for human pheromones is the syncing of menses.

In general, it doesn’t appear that there are active nerves or genes related to VNO function in humans. In fact, most of the evidence for a functional VNO comes from research conducted in the 1990s by a group from Utah. Coincidentally, funding for their research came from a corporation that makes personal care products containing steroids that Monti-Bloch and his colleagues claimed the VNO could detect—pheromones that would turn your date on. Their results have never been replicated.

Fuck the appendix.

Appendix

Plica Semiluminaris

Anyone who has a cat or dog has probably caught the occasional glimpse of a third eyelid–a translucent screen that sometimes creeps across the eye when the animal is falling asleep.

This third eyelid, also called a haw, nictitating membrane or plica semiluminaris, lets animals protect, moisten, and clear debris from their eyes while still being able to see what’s going

on. Manatees use them to see underwater, peregrine falcons to protect their eyes on 200 mile-per-hour dives for prey, aardvarks to ward off bites from the termites they eat, polar bears to filter UV light from blindingly white snow, and woodpeckers to prevent injury when drilling wood.

In humans, the nictitating membrane has shrunken down to a fold of tissue near the fleshy pink bulb at the inner corner of our eyes where crusty flotsam accumulates in the mornings. It’s unclear why we humans don’t have fully functioning nictitating membranes. Granted, unlike some three-lidded creatures, we’re not constantly diving underwater, dealing with thrashing prey, or getting sand in our eyes.

But think about it—we could see underwater, look at solar eclipses, ski without goggles, open our eyes in a sandstorm, conduct carefree chemistry experiments, and bike in the rain!

Just to name a few examples.

Flehmen response: when an animal curls its upper lip back and inhales to help waft pheromones in the vomeronasal organ located above the roof of the mouth.

OCTOBER 04 2013

Hiccup

As far as anyone can tell, hiccups also serve no useful function in humans. What is a hiccup, physiologically? It is a spasm of the diaphragm with an accompanying reflex that slams shut the glottis, resulting in a sound that is difficult to reproduce in text. They are mostly harmless, but if chronic can take a turn for the pathological.

“Prolonged hiccup is a rare but disabling condition which can induce depression, weight loss, and sleep deprivation. A wide variety of pathological conditions can cause chronic hiccup: myocardial infarction, brain tumor, renal failure, prostate cancer, abdominal surgery, etc,” (Eur Respir J. 1993 Apr;6(4):563-75). Even lupus can cause chronic

hiccup! The pathophysiology of this debilitating disease is not well defined, but pharmacological therapy can include anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, intravenous lidocaine, or even the dissociative club drug/horse tranquilizer ketamine.

A less-involved treatment is stimulation of the vagus nerve, which innervates the diaphragm. This was known even by the godless Greeks. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes once began to speak but was seized by a bout of hiccups.

Eryximachus advised: “If you hold your breath a long time perhaps the hiccups will be willing to stop. But if not, gargle with water, and if they’re very severe, grab something you think will tickle your nose and make yourself sneeze!” These last two are ways of stimulating the vagal nerve. To the ancient’s recommendation I would add the gag reflex.

Hiccupping is a bizarre activity. The muscles of inspiration contract, as if to suck in wind, but then reflexively close off the windpipe. This makes little sense, except perhaps for an amphibious creature who would use an inspiratory action plus glottal closing to move water across its gills while preventing it from entering its lungs. Perhaps like gill slits, the hiccup is a holdover from an amphibious existence. Babies in utero are seen to hiccup before they ever breathe, and premature infants can spend up to 2.5 percent of their time hiccuping. Moreover, when a tadpole’s lungs are full of air, it is less likely to gill ventilate. This seems suspiciously like taking a deep breath and holding it to stop hiccups. One theory suggests that normal breathing evolved using the amphibious hiccup-like respiratory pattern generator as a scaffold (note that hiccups usually have a regular rate), but that this defunct circuit can occasionally resurface, as when my mom gets drunk. Who knows if it’s true? It’s just a theory.

Duckface: when an eligible millennial pushes its lips together to give the impression of having larger lips and cheekbones.

SCIENCE █ 10

COVER TO COVER Hipgnosis & the fate of album art

by Maya Sorabjee Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

an inflated pig flies over a disused power station; two men shake hands, one with a burning arm; a fleet of hospital beds lines a beach; a sadhu levitates next to an ancient water tank.

And then light is diffracted through a prism on a black square. +++ the works of hipgnosis, a London-based art design group, fit the surrealist bill. Yet the Hipgnosis oeuvre notably differs from typical surrealist imagery in that it contains real constructions—no Photoshop, no nothing. The group denied the ease of making impossible images with mediums that could readily accommodate fantasy, like painting or collage.

Instead, its process involved creating improbable mise-enscènes: flying to the Sahara, painstakingly constructing the vista, and then taking a picture. This was the craft of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, the men behind the company who devoted their careers to dreaming up the covers of rock music’s greatest albums. Thorgerson passed away last spring, keaving behind an enduring visual legacy.

“Hipgnosis never thought about what was happening at the time,” Aubrey Powell told the Independent. “Sure, we were influenced by our upbringing—Fellini, Alan Watts, or Dali— and we probably subconsciously plagiarized the works of others, stamping it with our own identity. But current affairs never entered into the equation. No anti-Vietnam or Down With Margaret Thatcher images for us—the album cover image should be able to transcend any era.”

Their iconic visual language shied away from politics, instead rooting itself in cultural allusions. René Magritte’s “Son of Man” echoes in the faceless figure on the inside of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here. Andy Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper reflects in the bovine cover of their 1970 release Atom Heart Mother. Their canvas was the big juicy sleeve of a vinyl record, their fuel the wacky material of a booming sci-fi age. And with Pink Floyd, Hipgnosis conjured up their most powerful symbol. +++ thorgerson met roger waters and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd at school in Cambridge as teenagers. They played rugby together, sat around by the river along with Powell and David Gilmour. The friendship stuck. They shared an apartment in central London, and one day Barrett scrawled the word HIPGNOSIS on their apartment door in a fit of elegant wordplay: hip (cool) + gnosis (mystical knowledge). In 1967 Powell and Thorgerson returned the favor, designing their first cover for Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.

Amidst stacked guitar shops on London’s Denmark Street sat Hipgnosis’ studio, from which a steady stream of album art flowed. To them, designing cover art was more than advertising a product—it was about creating an accompaniment to an immersive musical experience. It was about strangeness, and the strangeness caught on. “Enigmatic symbolism as a representational icon became preferable, even if it had nothing to do with the music inside the cardboard package,” says Powell. “Pink Floyd with a cow on the cover and no signature to say who they were or what the title of the record was...unthinkable. But successful.”

11 █ arts

In early 1973, it took Pink Floyd about five minutes to select the cover amongst several options for their forthcoming album, The Dark Side of the Moon. The diffracting prism stood out from the rest for its boldness and simplicity. “Some things took us weeks of deliberation, but DSOTM came quite easily,” Powell reflects. The image’s enormous success, however, paved the way for a new era of brand exploitation, as it began to be slapped onto every sellable object in sight.

“I am flattered that people still walk around with DSOTM tee shirts and can buy flip flops and alarm clocks and coffee cups with the image on them. But it breaks my heart that rock and roll bands will sell their souls for another buck,” laments Powell.

Perhaps this proliferation was due to the fact that cover art back then was the sole visual tether between musicians and their fans. Before the advent of the music video or the Instagram feed, album art dominated the music world. And the power of the LP sleeve stretches far beyond the reach of Hipgnosis and other album designers. In 1969, The Beatles take a nonchalant stroll across a zebra crossing on Abbey Road and decades later tourists still exasperate motorists with mimetic performances that pay homage to that legendary scene. In 1967, Andy Warhol screen prints a banana for The Velvet Underground’s debut album and decades later there are copyright suits about its use on unlicensed merchandise.

Andy would be proud, because consumer culture has proved him right: The banal object he picked was elevated to iconic status, reproduced by the millions, and became banal again.

Do these images really represent the music they brand? Many seem to detach from their musical counterparts to float away into a realm of their own significance, and with it, their own commercial value. The Dark Side of the Moon may just be a fortuitously rare case where both design and music redefined their genres. But Powell believes that the seemingly delicate balance between music and image actually tilts in his favor.

“The Rolling Stones’ Andy Warhol zip cover,” he challenges.

“Ask someone in the street if they know that image and I would bet nine times out of ten they recognize the album cover but couldn’t sing a note off the record.” Try again. “Take John Pasche’s Rolling Stones red tongue logo, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy—same deal. Given the test of time, if you are not an ardent fan of the band, I believe the visual image will more likely stand up.”

So on one hand, we have cover art that far surpasses its musical accompaniment in reach and recognition. But on the other, we have a digital age that has shrunk cover art to reflect its lessening significance. We are now in “the age of the thumbnail,” Thorgerson declares in an uncredited YouTube interview, an age where the forms in which we consume music have drastically changed. Powell reminisces about the days of a vastly different consumer culture: “You’d go to a record store on a Saturday afternoon to buy your favorite band, but then you would have enough money to buy another record, and often the second album was bought on the merit of the cover alone.

“Your album collection defined who you were—cool or uncool. The greater the collection lining the walls of your flat, the more upstanding a person you were. And you could roll joints on them, sniff a line of coke off them, and then spend hours studying the nuances of what was displayed throughout the album cover design.”

forty years later, this experience has been digitized.

An August 2013 Rolling Stone article recounts plummeting album sales—both physical and digital—this summer, while streaming services like Spotify and Pandora continue to grow.

Music producer Nigel Godrich speculates: “If people had been listening to Spotify instead of buying records in 1973, I doubt very much if [Pink Floyd’s] Dark Side would have been made.

It would just be too expensive.” With very few people buying physical albums today, musicians are beginning to explore new formats in which to present their work. Jay Z’s muchawaited July release Magna Carta… Holy Grail was introduced to the market via a Samsung Galaxy app that prompted social media users to share redacted lyrics in order to reveal more content. iTunes LP is an attempt to preserve the album booklet online, providing purchasers with multimedia to peruse while listening.

But despite the richness of content, it lacks the intimacy and tactility that remains an exclusive quality of physical packaging. When we listen to music online it’s often tucked away in a minimized tab, and even if one looks at the cover, it’s hard to be excited about a pretty but tiny square in the corner. And we don’t necessarily want the album—playlists now offer a personalized alternative, which reduce cover art to a bunch of pixels on a grid of many. Nevertheless, Dan Abbott of Thorgerson’s later design company StormStudios remains hopeful about the status of his field: “When we design an album cover it also gets used for posters, print and web ads, iTunes thumbnails, on the band’s website and so on,” he tells the Independent. “One might say it has even more uses these days!” +++ the album cover is now one of many ways in which we interact with artists we love. But like most forms of art, it will one day lose its potency; and as it does, it graciously makes way for more experimental forms of presentation. The focal point of music’s visual culture has long evolved into its more dynamic incarnations—the graphic t-shirt, the music video, the website. While physical packaging has become a vestigial element, Powell is right to believe that music will always require a visual counterpoint. Whether the cover art for an EP or the video for a single, music and image are inextricably linked. And though Powell began our interview with a deterministic statement—“the role of the album cover no longer exists”—he ended on an optimistic note. “I would love to be around in 100 years to experience a re-release of The Dark Side of the Moon and see what the clever clogs come up with then,” he muses. “Mind blowing, I’m sure.”

MAYA SORABJEE B’16 has an album collection that would make her uncool.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I NEED A TITLE And a subhead Germany, is one of the most successful systems for shortening recoveries. Doctors remove a patient’s blood and spin it in a centrifuge before putting a number of glass beads into the solution. The glass induces white blood cells to release IRAP, a natural anti-inflammatory. The solution is then injected back into the patient’s damaged joint. The futuristic treatment was solely intended to treat arthritis, but it was found to aid in most post-surgical joint injuries as well. Following surgery, the body’s natural inflammation response revs up, not so much for the sake of healing as for the sake of protecting the injured area. Regenokine shortens this phase, enabling the healing process to start earlier, while also promoting healing. Even Pope John Paul II, has had the procedure. +++ There has never been so much money in contracts and endorsements for those at the top of their sports. The difference in earning power between the best player and the 100th best player in any given sport is monumentally larger than the difference in their skills. Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men’s tennis player, made 20.6 million dollars in prize money and endorsements during the first half of 2012, according to Forbes. Michael Russell, currently ranked 81st in the world, recently told The New York Times that he made $300,000 in his best year. The difference in earnings only helps to further enlarge the gap in skillset. Djokovic can afford to employ a crack team of trainers and coaches and put them in the comfiest hotels. He can also spare $75,000 for an egg-shaped pressure chamber that increases circulation, stimulates blood cell generation, and expels lactic acid. +++ But it’s not only about training. It’s also about genes: LeBron James is a genetic freak. He has more fast twitch muscle than just about every person alive, reaching unprecedented levels of success due to the combination of hard work and genetic near-perfection. What, then, would happen if scientists could isolate the best of LeBron’s DNA, and combine it, say, with the cream of WNBA MVP Candace Parker’s genetic crop?

Geneticists are getting closer to making this a reality. Parents will soon be able to pick which genes they want their children to inherit. This applies not only to eye and hair color but also to height and percentage of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers. If the technology continues to develop, there could be a whole litter of little LeBrons running this way and that. And if, at the same time, training keeps improving, we may just be scratching the surface of what is within the realm of athletic possibility.

by Sam Bresnick Illustrated by my dawgs

put more stress on ligaments, are a big reason for the rash of injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in recent years. Watching footage of professional basketball from the 1980s, it is obvious that the style of play was much different.

The “Showtime” Lakers depended on Magic Johnson slinging passes and Kareem posting up to create scoring opportunities.

Athletes did not move as quickly or as explosively because they weren’t as well conditioned. The Miami Heat’s modern offense, on the other hand, is predicated on Lebron James and On an overcast day in Mexico City in October 1968, Jim Hines ran 100 meters in 9.95 seconds. Hines walked away Dwyane Wade juking and wiggling their way into the paint from the 1968 Olympics with a gold medal dangling from in order to create open shots for themselves and others. The his neck. It was the first time in the history of the sport that heightened pace of play makes basketball incredibly fun to anyone had run that distance in under ten seconds. Fifteen watch, but it is also responsible for countless knee injuries. years later, Calvin Smith ran a 9.93 in Colorado Springs. AndBefore advances in surgical techniques, severe leg injuries it would be another five years before Carl Lewis ran a 9.92. Inequaled a one-way ticket out of the NBA. New York Knick Bernard King was leading the NBA 20 years, sprinters could only improve Hines’s time across 328 in scoring at 32.9 points per game in 1985 when he tore his feet by three hundredths of a second.

Fast-forward 21 years to 2009. Usain Bolt—in all likeli- right ACL. The ligament runs diagonally through the knee hood the fastest man to ever bound across the Earth—ran and acts to stabilize the joint by restricting forward motion the same distance in 9.59 seconds. How could Bolt make thisof the tibia during movement. It is one of the few ligaments staggering improvement in such a short race over a compara- that will not heal on its own, and its position deep within the tively short time? How could a human perform this superhu- knee makes it difficult to operate on. King’s doctors told him that he would never play again. Ignoring his prognosis, King man feat?

As consumer fandom has exploded over the past twenty opted for surgery and extensive rehab. Dr. Norman Scott cut an incision from King’s thigh to the top of his shin, took his years, so too has the money in sports. Athletic apparel kneecap out of place, and then fashioned him a new ACL out companies like Nike and Adidas—as well as luxury goods manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz—have picked up on of tendon tissue that was still attached to muscle. He then the global appeal and marketability of top athletes. Alongside put the kneecap back in place and closed the wound with with the rise of the Internet and its social media, advertising 40 metal staples. Scott kept King from bending his knee for has transformed sports icons into global celebrities, creating a weeks, which led to muscle atrophy and acute knee stiffness. It demand for athletes to reach incredible levels of performance.took King almost two years to get back on the court, the first And the scientific world has taken notice, working to improveinstance of someone conquering an ACL tear in professional sports. He said during his Hall of Fame induction speech that the durability and capability of athletes.

The keys to Bolt’s virtually inhuman performances— “My personal legacy is what I did for five hours a day, six days shattering, time and again, the historic world record in 100Ma week, to come back from an injury that players were not Not saying he’s superhuman, but SAM BRESNICK B’15 coming back from.” with ease—lie in the emerging sciences of sport.

These days, an ACL injury necessitates between 6-12 +++ Today’s athletes take better care of themselves, train harder, months of rehab before resuming play. No giant scar runand therefore jump higher, cut quicker, and run faster. This is ning down the knee—the only signs of surgery are tiny marks the age of the nonstop athlete. Gone are those lazy summers left by arthroscopes, surgical instruments that have cameras, when professional hockey players raked in some extra dough detachable saws, claws, and shavers. Danish physician Severin Nordentoft invented the arthroscope prototype in 1912. His by selling used cars. There is no more off-season. Today. most professionals embark on seemingly impossible exercise creation was deeply flawed, as the tiny video cameras that routines after their seasons end. Roy Hibbert, 7’3’’ behemoth allow doctors to see inside the knee did not exist. The 1990s of the Indiana Pacers, journeyed to San Antonio in July to flipsaw the first consistent use of arthroscopy for repairing ACLs. tractor-trailer tires in 105-degree heat. In the past 30 years, The procedure revolutionized sports medicine, as most surgerthis offseason training has led to extraordinary improvements ies can be done without having to cut athletes open; surgeons can perform entire operations within the joints themselves. in athleticism.

Take, for example, Kobe Bryant, basketball’s best shoot- Patients often come back stronger, not weaker, from ACL ing guard for the past fifteen years. His fearsome competitive-tears.

Adrian Peterson was back on the field nine months after ness, reptilian agility, and prodigious skill have been etched a 2011 ACL tear. In 2012, he scrapped his way to within into hardwoods across the globe. Behind the scenes, Bryant’s offseason workouts have become legendary. Operating eight yards of the NFL single season rushing record. Peterson alongside trainer Tim Grover, the man Michael Jordan creditsis the gold standard of ACL recovery. What was once a careerwith helping him achieve his rare levels of greatness, Kobe hasender is now only a short intermission. Players who overwork themselves in order to become elite have the security of knowpopularized his “666” workout regimen. ing that, if they hurt themselves, they will soon be back on Bryant’s normal routine involves two hours of flying the field. This holds true for most ligament and bone related around a track followed by all sorts of agility drills: jump rope, ladders, box jumps. He then proceeds to mechanically injuries. Concussions and other types of head trauma, on the other hand, are impossible to properly treat or prevent. drill shots from all over the court, from hitting layups to Post-surgical procedures designed to promote healing pouring in endless 3-pointers. Sweat dripping and muscles bulging, Bryant finishes with an hour of endurance cardio andhave also improved. Regenokine, a procedure invented in Olympic-style weightlifting. Included in these maniacal physical exertions are military-style plyometric sets and exercises on underwater and zero gravity treadmills. On top of it all: he starts this regiment at 6:00 AM. This is, needless to say, a far cry from the early summers of Wilt Chamberlain’s career, when he used to work as a bellhop at Kutsher’s, a Jewish resort in the Catskills. +++ As athletes continue to get bigger, stronger and faster, they put more force through their joints. Muscles are growing, bones, tendons, and ligaments are not. Stronger muscles, which

OCTOBER 4 2013

MATING A few weeks ago, as we were dragging our fingers through the water and dangling our feet off the dock, a duck drifted toward us. There was just ripples and treading; the beak and the body.

Someone shouts, “Did you know that….” A lake duck’s penis uncoils, sometimes up to five feet.

The female’s vagina has adapted to adopt the torsion. Something much stranger is transpiring under the surface. So, we crane our necks. We are curious; we try to peek. Seeing nothing, we turn to ancient texts, to tattered encyclopedias and yellowing journals, to the darkest recesses of the Internet, searching for what happens underwater, overland and mid-flight. Here’s what we found.

SNAILS Two spiral-coiled shells slowly circle each other among the garden muck. The eyestalks emerge first, wiggling in anticipation, then the soft bodies start to ooze toward each other.

Both snails shoot calcium love-darts into the neck of the other—these mucus-coated harpoons are supposed to increase the potency and viability of the snails’ sperm, but if poorly aimed, they can also kill the receiver. Then the two warriors press the undersides of their bodies up against each other, their white sexual organs sliming together like two messily French-kissing tongues.

Snails are hermaphroditic. Some snails choose one sex when mating, while others can ovulate and inseminate at the same time. A few varieties of snails can also reproduce asexually; females can clone their female offspring without male fertilization. Despite the fact that it requires more energy and is not necessary for the species’ procreation, these snails still have partnered sex.

In March of this year, University of Iowa scientists received $876,752 in National Science Foundation grants to study the phenomenon of sexual reproduction in a species that can reproduce more efficiently asexually. The abstract for the project asks a big question: “Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs?” In a TV segment criticizing excessive government spending on scientific studies, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto offered his theory: “Just hazarding a guess. May be more fun.” –MH

13 █ features

RABBITS The voracious sexual appetite of rabbits is notorious. Unlike other mammals that go into heat at certain points of the year, they go at it year-round. Their sessions are brief but frequent, punctuated by short naps. But for bunnies as for the rest of the Animal Kingdon, sex is not all about satisfaction—it’s about continuing the species without giving up their carefree, rather defenseless nature. And it begins a short 12 hours after sex, when a female rabbit will release ovaries, which can become inseminated almost immediately.

From there, it is only about a month until her babies are born, in a large litter of up to 12. Some estimates suggest that a single female rabbit and her offspring could potentially produce 184,597,433,860 rabbits in seven years. That number, in case your eyes glazed over it, is over one hundred billion.

These estimates are based on a few, slightly unrealistic criteria: that the rabbit would become pregnant immediately on beginning to ovulate after her last pregnancy, which happens in a matter of minutes; that rabbit reproduction occurs year-round, when in fact it is generally concentrated between February and October; that the rabbit will live for seven years, which is longer than projected. But still, the number could easily be in the millions—all coming from a single matriarch.

So if rabbits are reproducing by the millions, why are we not commonly stumbling over floppy-eared younglings, finding them under our pillows, gifting them to our sweethearts as an easily available sign of our attraction? In the areas to which they are native, rabbits are surrounded by predators, so there’s an added urgency to the fevered coupling of parents striving to continue the species. It’s breed or die out, and these bunnies and their honeys are more than happy to fight the good fight to keep their species alive. –EW

ANGLERFISH Whoever said that there are plenty of fish in the sea has clearly never hit rock bottom. At 3,300 to 6,600 feet down in the deep, dark ocean, it is hard for Ceratiidae, or deep-sea anglerfish, to find love. Anglerfishes’ trademark bioluminescent lure—a movable extension of bone that sprouts from the middle of their heads and terminates in a glowing ball of flesh—helps them find food (or rather, food find them) in the darkness. But what about finding mates? Evolution found an answer: Male ceratioids, though 40 times smaller than females and ill-equipped to survive on their own, have excellent olfactory organs that help them detect females’ pheromones soon after birth. The undiscriminating male anglerfish bites into the skin of the first female he finds. He then releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body so that the pair become permanently fused together. Once bitten, the female provides nutrients for the male via their shared circulatory system. The male’s body atrophies as his testicles grow so that, when the female is ready to reproduce, he can provide her with sperm. Deep-sea polygamy is not out of the question: In the interest of efficiency, multiple males can easily merge with one female if she is the first they encounter. When scientists started studying ceratioids, they initially found what they thought were females with extra appendages that appeared to be parasites. But no, they were the males of the species. –JW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Megan Hauptman, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan, John White & Emma Wohl Illustration by Jackie Rent

BEES Fred had been born a honeybee, but at times he wished he had been born a bird, or perhaps an elephant. There were the obvious advantages, of course: a bird can soar to heights of which a bee can only dream, and an elephant fears no bug-zapper. But more than anything, neither a bird nor an elephant has genitals that literally explode on ejaculation, causing a less-than-petite ­mort.

The male honeybee, called a “drone,” is one of a number of animals and insects that commit sexual suicide. Upon ejaculation, the drone’s penis explodes, tearing his abdomen open and ultimately killing him. Nature is brutal in its efficiency—the drone’s sole function is to fertilize the queen, and once this function is performed, the drone would become just another mouth for the hive to feed. Dying in climax, however, might be nature’s way of saying it’s better to go out with a bang than a whimper; if a drone fails to mate with the queen, he will be turned away from the hive and left to freeze to death in the coming winter, blue balls in the most literal sense. –JS

OCTOBER 04 2013

SWANS Swan sex isn’t all that weird. In fact, that’s what’s maybe what’s weirdest about it—you basically know how it works already.

The story goes like this: Leda, mother of Helen of Troy, slept with the Greek god Zeus while he was a swan—and while the part about her giving birth to the most beautiful woman ever by laying an egg is just creative license, the physical logistics of their conquest make more sense when you understand one thing.

Swans have penises. This is only true of flightless and water-bound birds, but not the vast majority of the species.

Those that fly were designed to be as light as possible, shedding themselves of all unnecessary weight through evolution—excess weight that included external sexual organs.

Most birds have a single organ, the cloaca, which functions as bladder, waste receptacle, anus, and sexual organs. They rub against their mate’s cloaca to really get things going.

Swans, it seems, are not so secure in their masculinity. Their penis is shaped like a spiral and has no urethra, because birds do not produce urine. It becomes erect, not as in humans by blood rushing to it, but through lymphatic pressure—a more efficient pressure requiring less weight. This allows them to mate under water with far more grace and a much higher rate of satisfaction than the kids down the street breaking into the neighbor’s pool. –EW

PRAYING MANTIS The male praying mantis mounts the female from behind. He seizes her thorax and restrains her wings with his forearms.

He arches his abdomen, rummaging for her abdomen. As he clampers, she clutches the branch. The weevils scatter and she lets him control her in joint-bending shifting, in a tightrope walk where she must let him hold her, all of her, across the twigs.

But once the male has climaxed, when he starts to withdraw to find fruit flies to eat or another partner to mate with, the female will dart backwards, rotating her head to peck at his eyes. Only then does it become obvious that the female is much larger with twice the wingspan. He flails in her arms; she pins him to the tree and bites off his head, sucking green body fluid out of his skull. Her partner and prey is the nearest high-energy meal. Sexual cannibalism means she is fertilized and full. The father is sacrificed for the sake of his offspring.

Love kills. –LR

features █ 14

static

15 █ ARTS

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motion

by Vera Carothers

OCTOBER 4 2013

Arts â–ˆ 16

Soft skulls, cold hearts the evolution of head protection in the NHL

by Madeline Coburn Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas the puck is dropped at the faceoff and won back to Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Kimmo Timonen. He fires a low slap shot towards the goal. Somewhere along the way the puck is deflected off of a stick, drastically changing its trajectory, causing it to shoot upwards into the eye of New York Rangers defenseman Marc Staal. Like all hockey players, Staal wears a helmet, but unlike some, he chooses not to don any form of facial protection. When the puck smashes into his face, there is nothing but skin and bone to slow it down. Staal is writhing on the ice, his legs kicking violently. He clutches his hand to his face, but blood still squeezes through. Staal’s defensive partner Dan Girardi goes to his side, kneels down, and gently puts a hand on his shoulder, unsure of what to do but desperate to do something.

The camera pans over to the Rangers bench. Nobody talks. The expressions on the faces of the players betray fear and concern. In a sport where a couple of stitches or a few missing teeth are par for the course, eye injuries are not to be taken lightly. Such injuries can be career-threatening and life changing, and the unspoken question hangs heavy in the air at Madison Square Garden—is it the eye, and if it is, how bad? +++ marc staal missed the rest of the season but was back on the ice for pre-season. His right pupil is permanently dilated; his vision will likely never return to normal, but he expects to return to his pre-injury level of play. The terrifying injury proved a turning point in an ongoing debate in the National Hockey League as to whether or not helmet visors should be made mandatory. According to the NHL Player’s Association, visors—which attach to the helmet and cover about one third to one half of the face—were worn by a record-high 73 percent of NHL players last season. They do not provide full protection to the eyes and face, but they have been shown to drastically decrease the probability of serious injury. This summer, the league initiated a new policy in which all players with fewer than 25 NHL games will be required to wear visors.

The debate began in earnest back in 2000, when an errant stick sliced into the eye of Bryan Berard, causing his retina to tear and reducing his vision to 20/600. A long string of eye injuries followed. None of the players were wearing visors. After each injury, more and more people called for a rule to make visors mandatory. +++ the nhl has a reputation as a rough and tumble, hardhitting league, where violent fights in the middle of games are accepted and often applauded. For many players and fans, violence, fighting, and toughness are critical aspects of the game. They are tradition. It’s a tradition that breeds an environment of machismo: For years visors, and before that helmets, were for wimps.

The NFL made helmets mandatory in 1943. The NHL did not do so until 1979. Still, a grandfather clause excluded veterans from the mandate; the last person to play in the NHL without a helmet was Craig MacTavish in 1997. Even goalies did not wear any facial protection until 1959, when hall of fame Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante wholeheartedly defied the helmet stigma. In a game against the Rangers, he was hit in the face with a puck. He left the ice to get stitched up, but refused to return unless he was allowed to wear the crude fiberglass mask that he wore in practices.

Coach Toe Blake grudgingly complied, Plante returned, and the Canadiens won the game. But to everybody’s surprise, and Blake’s chagrin, Plante continued to wear the mask in the following games. Players, fans, and management saw the mask as a sign of cowardice. When asked if he wore the mask out of fear, Plante replied, “If you jumped out of a plane without a parachute, would that make you brave?” The innovation eventually caught on. In the ’60s players discovered that curving the stick blade allowed them to shoot the puck higher. But these early curves also gave less control. As goalies faced shots that dipped and curved erratically around their heads, they began to see the wisdom of Plante’s ways. By the ’70s, while helmets were still uncommon for skaters, they were widely accepted for goalies. +++ but this kind of hockey was a regional trend. In contrast to the North American game, European hockey was a more finesse-driven sport that rarely featured fighting. It emphasized speed and accurate passing over physicality. Some considered it more elegant, others called it soft, but the distinction between the two was clear and widely recognized.

Fighting and toughness were integral parts of hockey in Europe, and helmets held no stigma. When Canada played the USSR in a 1972 Summit Series, nearly all the Canadian players still did not wear helmets, while every member of the Soviet team wore one. In 1976, the mostly helmetless Philadelphia Flyers played an exhibition game against the USSR’s Red Army team. The 1970s-era Flyers were affectionately called the Broad Street Bullies by their fans and derided as thugs and goons by their critics. The team rose to dominance through a stunning display of skill, force, and brutality, winning the heart of Philadelphia and back-to-back Stanley Cups in ’74 and ’75 in the process. The Red Army played like a well-oiled machine. During their 1976 North American tour they had already handedly beaten the Rangers and the Bruins.

They tied the Canadiens, considered the best team in the NHL at the time. Philadelphia was the last stop of the tour.

It was only an exhibition game but Cold War animosities heightened the stakes. Americans and Canadians wanted to show the USSR just how tough Philly was. The game soon got physical. When a Soviet player was lying on the ice after a big hit, the Flyers announcer explained, “The Soviet feeling is when you are hit and ripped pretty good, take your time,” to which the other commentator quipped, “Oh, my bones!”

The hit proved to be the last straw for the Soviet coach, who was so incensed that no penalty was called that he pulled his team off the ice, refusing to continue to play such “animal hockey,” as he later described it to the press. After almost 20 minutes the Red Army was persuaded to return to the ice, only to be embarrassed by the Flyers 4-1. To fans throughout Canada and the US, the spectacle proved that though the Soviets were skilled, they were still soft. +++ for most of the ’70s, players scorned helmets, but the seed of change had already been planted. The year was 1968. Bill Masterton, 29, was flying down the ice. He dished a pass off to a teammate then collided with two opposing players, falling backwards and landing on his head. The impact caused massive internal bleeding. Masterton died 30 hours later. Most considered it a freak accident, but others wondered whether a helmet could have saved his life. Teammate and friend Ray Cullen later recalled to the Dallas Morning News, “It took Bill dying for all of us to start thinking, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Several players did start wearing helmets, but management was still opposed and peer pressure was strong, so helmets remained uncommon. But time went on. Hockey got faster, players got bigger, and shots got harder. The brutal reality of Masterton’s death loomed over the league, and the more dangerous the game became, the more ominous his death became.

Finally in 1979, eleven years after Bill Masterton died, the league officially mandated the use of helmets—at that point about 70 percent of players were voluntarily wearing them.

The same tough-guy mentality that drove players to reject helmets causes some to spurn visors. In 2009, Tanner Glass told the Canadian National Post, “I’m old school…Only Europeans and soft guys wear visors.” But Glass is an enforcer, a player whose primary role is to fight. In this niche, creating a tough, intimidating persona is critical. Nobody wants to be viewed as a coward for fighting with a visor. For those whose jobs don’t rely on an ability to fight, reasons not to wear visors are less clear. Some insist that it obscures their vision, or that they feel uncomfortable wearing it. Defenseman Jay Bouwmeester admitted to Randy Sportak of The Calgary Sun that there was little sense to his choice not to wear a visor. “When people say, ‘You’re stupid not to wear one,’ I’m not going to disagree, but there are a lot of things in life that make no sense that people still do.” +++ eventually visors will be universal. Marc Staal is back on the ice with a visor. So are his two brothers, Eric and Jordan, and Dan Girardi, who was on the ice when he got hurt. Some day in the future we will be watching a game where visors will be so commonplace they are no longer noticed. Maybe a high stick will glance harmlessly off plastic, or a slap shot will deflect high into a player’s eyes, knock him down, but draw no blood. Maybe then we will shudder, imagine what could have been, and wonder how there was ever a day when nobody wore visors.

MADELINE COBURN B’14 is almost old enough to remember the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup.

17 █ SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Teenage Internet Euphoria: A solo show by d14n3 zh0u

Double Take: The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America

Oct 4-10 // 1st Floor Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence 1PM-1:45PM // Chace Center Gallery, RISD MuseArt from The List’s own Diane Zhou will exhibit um, 20 N. Main St., Providence from October 4th until the 10th. Come reminisce RISD Printmaking professor Brian Shure and about the first time you confessed your love Brown Sociology professor Dr. Michael White 1/\/ 1337!!!1111!111 discuss issues of lithography and immigration

Brown Divest Coal Teach-In: The Ethics of Divestment

as presented by Enrique Chagoya’s monumental print.

7:30PM-9PM // Smith-Buonanno 106, Brown University, Providence Speakers will include Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, George D. Thurston ’73, Director of the Program in Exposure Assessment and Human Health Effects at the Department of Environmental Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine, and Junior Walk, mountain-top removal activist with Coal River Mountain Watch and the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation. NB: The Corporation will be watching.

Internet Cat Video Festival

6:30PM, 10:30PM. Showings until the 10th // Cable Car Cinema, 204 S. Main St., Providence // $9.50/adult $8/student Come watch the Providence showing of the world’s second ever Internet Cat Video Festival. The festival began last year IRL in Minneapolis.

Hamilton House Annual Benefit Breakfast

9AM // Central Congregational Church, 296 Angell St., Providence // $10 Come support Hamilton House Adult Learning Exchange by eating breakfast. Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health Dr. Michael Fine will be speaking.

What Cheer Day at the Rhode Island Historical Society 10AM-4PM // John Brown House, 52 Power St., Providence // $15/adults, free for kids under 12

Interested in vintage cosplay? Do you like men in uniform? Come meet costumed players and watch the drama unfold in the lives of a Rhode Island family during the Revolution. There will be men in uniform cooking and drilling on the front lawn.

Étienne Balibar: Althusser’s Dramaturgy and the Critique of Ideology

Catherine Belling: Plotless Stories and Poor Historians: Hypochondria’s Challenge to Illness Narrative

5:30PM-7:00PM // 305 Pembroke Hall, Brown University, Providence.

Patient’s illness narratives tend to be shaped by medical as well as narrative expectations: readers assume the patient is really sick, and the disease course follows one of three likely medical plots: acute, chronic, or progressive.

But what happens when the narrator is a hypochondriac? This talk explores the way hypochondria, as pathography without disease told by narrators without credibility, unsettles the usual assumptions about how both patients and doctors employ and narrate illness and disease.

Belling is the author of “A Condition of Doubt; On the Meanings of Hypochondria.”

5:30PM // Studio 1, S410, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence Come listen to political philosopher and Marxist theorist Étienne Balibar. He generally thinks and writes about violence and civility and borders and representations of the stranger, the subject, the citizen, and cosmopolitics. Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X and Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Thanks, MCM Department, English Department, and Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies for bringing him to us. Reception to follow.

Locally Made: Kristen Minsky Curates “On Madness and Feminine Identity”

12PM-1PM // RISD Museum Contemporary Art Gallery, 224 Benefit Street, Providence // Free with museum admission ($12/adult, $5/student) Minsky is a neo-vaudevillian gal about town.

Come see what that means. Also, come see what ‘feminine identity’ is (lol).

What I Am Thinking About Now (Ethnoporn)

4PM-5PM // 303 Brown-RISD Hillel, 80 Brown St., Providence TAPS Professor Eng-Beng Lim will explore the photographic collection of the ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee and the artist Walter Spies from the 1930s that focused on Balinese men and boys in recumbent poses that can be described as ethno-porn. The queer story of the white man/native boy is complicated by the snapshots in question, at once invoking and yet exceeding the visual representation of gendered power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. Lim is interested in the kinds of questions that may be raised around these photographs as a way to think about transnational visuality, performance and sexuality. Space is limited! RSVP to csrea@brown.edu

Lori Baker and Ray Ragosta Read

4PM-5:30PM // Brown University Bookstore, 244 Thayer St., Providence Author Lori Baker will be reading from her new book “The Glass Ocean” and poet Ray Ragosta will be reading from “A Motive for Disappearance.”

They Might Be Giants

7PM// Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington St., Providence // $44-51 The people who brought you 500 of their songs on a Brooklyn answering machine as a part of their Dial-a-Song project are coming to Providence! Who knew they were a kid’s band?