The College Hill Independent V.29 N.04

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY OCTOBER 3, 2014 | V29 N4

independent

MANAGING EDITORS Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan NEWS Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick METRO Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris ARTS Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz FEATURES Jackie Gu, Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITOR Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Pranay Bose, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Amy Chen WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Polina Godz MVP Zeve Sanderson

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 4

NEWS 2 Week in Review

sebastian clark, edward friedman, & kyle giddon

3 Isis Crisis carly west

SPORTS 7 In Media Rice zeve sanderson

FEATURES 5 Lend Me a Hand stephanie hayes

4 A Bug’s Life elias bresnick

METRO 8 Ice Ice Baby jane argodale

9 Oh No Pro-Jo mika kligler

ARTS 5 Forbidden City matt marsico

LIT

15 Planned Parenthood hannah smith

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EPHEMERA Boni Mitchell lil’ meatsmack

X 18 Washed Out layla ehsan, sara khan, & pierie korostoff

FROM THE EDITOR S So look, we’ve made some mistakes. I’ve spent the last few days combing through my personal history and now I’ve got some things I feel like I should apologize for.

Not that everything’s my fault or anything like that, just that I wanted to say I was sorry. It gets pretty embarrassing back there but please, bear with me. I wanted to scan some flowers and make a whole page for this but we only get one color spread. I’m sorry. I’m sorry we misattributed your illustration and then spelled your name wrong. I’m sorry I still find the Windows XP aesthetic hilarious. For typos too, I’m sorry. I’m sort of sorry that I feel like I should be apologizing so much, it’s an annoying thing to do. But perhaps this isn’t the place. Plus, again, no color spread.

Lately I’ve started to notice that I introduce my presence in a room either by yawning or apologizing. I’m sorry, that’s a weird thing to do. I feel like I’ve learned to couch any serious behavioral comment about myself in apologetic irony. So you’ll laugh. And, look, I hate to corner you like this at this party. That’s such an awful thing to do and, yeah, I see your friends over there, but I just wanted to tell you how very sorry I am. No, but I am having fun, I just wanted to get this out on the table. There’re other things too: violence, dropped calls, inattentive friendship, and probably more ahead but maybe I’ll just let you go now.

Sorry there aren’t any digitized flowers.

Is this, like, supposed to be cathartic or something?

-PM

17 f(x)

dash elhauge

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

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN RETURNS

by Sebastian Clark, Edward Friedman, & Kyle Giddon

WHAT THE FUCK IS A BARRISTER? A British lawyer, basically. One of them, Amal Ramzi Alamuddin—also an activist and author—recently married George Clooney.

When George Clooney was named Sexiest Man Alive

by People Magazine for the second time in 2006, he talked about Italy in the interview following the award: “I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch.”

When George Clooney thought about Italy and the words “celebrate,” “dinner,” and “lunch,” he knew he’d have to do his next wedding in Venice, which he’s now done, as of last Saturday.

George Clooney has been named Sexiest Man Alive twice, and he’s gotten married twice, but he’s only won one Academy Award, which he won for his role in Syriana. (I’m not counting his third of Argo’s best picture Oscar, because he was an “Executive Producer”—whatever that means—so he had to share it, and I didn’t like that movie at all.)

Amal Alamuddin was born in Beirut and is 17 years younger than George Clooney. She speaks Arabic, French, and English. She went to Oxford, then law school at NYU. As a lawyer, she’s represented the state of Cambodia, a former Libyan intelligence chief, the first female Prime Minister of the Ukraine, and Julian Assange. “But Argo and Syriana were about the Middle East,” you say.

Purported discrepancies in the ethical value of the work of the two hot-but-in-kind-of-a-boring-way married people have been met with a couple headlines that are quite funny: “World famous human rights lawyer marries star of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over from The (other) Independent’s subsidiary i100. I also liked a headline on thebusinesswomanmedia.com that reads: “Internationally acclaimed barrister Amal Alamuddin marries an actor.” There’s that “barrister” word again.

Personally, having been taught what a “beard” was with the example of George Clooney and his years and years of ephemeral young model girlfriends—a beard, colloquially, is “any opposite sex escort taken to an event in an effort to give a homosexual [sic] person the apperance [sic] of being out on a date with a person of the opposite sex” (Urban Dictionary)— I’m hoping they’re at least good friends.

George Clooney has reportedly said that he’s “marrying up” and Amal Alamuddin’s close friend, Jae Kim, told ABC Entertainment: “ever since [Alamuddin] met George, she has been on time.” –EF

OCTOBER 3 2014

OUTLIVE, OUTPLAY, OUTLAST CART-OGRAPHY Admit it. We’ve all done it. I always do it. Shamelessly, in fact.

You leave the supermarket and stowaway your fresh groceries and Windex in your car, but then you don’t know what to do with your shopping cart. Besides walking 500 feet back to the K-Mart that you now despise for wasting your time, there is absolutely nowhere to put it. To you, the consumer, it was the mere vehicle of your most recent indulgence; you’re louche, you care not for it. You opt to push it aside, letting it roll to its heart’s content. In the corner of your eye, though, you notice it slowly rotate, then, turning fully, rapidly accelerate down the unapparent gradient of the parking lot toward the tailgate of the neighboring Ford Fiesta. If you are a somewhat conscientious shopper, you may feign pursuing it, but, usually, you let self-interest prevail in full pride, for you are now the proud owner of that Scorpion 6.0V Cordless Bagless Dirt Devil you have always wanted. How shopping carts then end up in basements and college dorms, nobody knows.

Our grotesque world now faces the colossal catastrophe that is shopping cart abandonment in a new form. The online shopping cart, the beautifully sleek digital counterpart to that rusty receipt-ridden metal thing you are accustomed to, is being abandoned like never before. According to the Baymard Institute, that institute you think you know at that university you can’t remember but is actually a UK-based web-research company, 67.45 percent of digital shopping carts are abandoned. These aren’t just empty, cockeyed rollers, either; in the digital world, carts are full of unpurchased goodies. That means 67 out of every 100 customers leave a website without purchasing anything that they put in their cart—a figure that would be unacceptable for a physical store. For online retailers, this amounts to $4 trillion of lost potential revenue each year.

The institute’s research, released earlier this week, asked shoppers why they left without paying. 32 percent of shoppers responded by saying the overall price was too expensive. Fair enough, given that the average online purchase is $116.58. A majority of these same people say they would go through with their purchase were the basket half the size and the price half as much. User interface has become too good at its desired ends of “not making the user think.” We love everything, fill up our carts, but, in the process, we are overwhelmed by the other possibilities. We consider buying it all, but then we buy nothing, for too much is too much. Window-shopping has taken up a new meaning, and asceticism has never been more ironic. –SC

Baseball fans might remember former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker for one of two reasons. First, for the several great bullpen seasons he strung together in the late nineties and early aughts, or, second, for the racist diatribe he gave to Sports Illustrated in 1999 about why he would never want to play for a New York team: “Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing...I’m not a very big fan of foreigners...How the hell did they get in this country?”

Since his retirement from baseball in 2003, Rocker has continued to court controversy. He sells t-shirts on his website that say “Speak English,” and he once claimed that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if there weren’t gun control laws in Germany. But this didn’t exactly make the evening news: most people took his comments as attention-seeking gibberish from a D-list celebrity, sad nonsense from a has-been whose baseball games were once broadcast to an audience of millions and who was just searching, searching, searching for a way back into primetime.

Good thing Americans love a second act.

Last week, John Rocker made his debut on Survivor, the reality TV show somehow in its 29th (!) season in which marooned strangers provide for their own survival (in places where people actually live), compete in challenges, and vote each other off the show. Knowing that his former athletic stardom (or reputation as a racist bigot) might make him a target for elimination, Rocker has so far tried to remain incognito among his tribemates. When recognized by one older Braves fan, he somehow convinced the man to keep quiet. But on the preview reel for next week’s show, Rocker is seen saying, “If you were a man, I’d knock your teeth out.”

The countdown continues for Rocker, and we wait in anticipation. Will he continue to blend in anonymously in his tropical beachside abode? Or will he be recognized and his true identity revealed? Either way, he better hope to find a way to avoid making enemies, or he might end up in a familiar place: washed up. –KG

NEWS

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FIGHTING STATELESSNESS WITH STATELESSNESS How western governments attempt to deal with the rise of ISIS

by Carly West illustration by Mark Benz

The Islamic State, a terrorist organization and self-proclaimed caliphate, has emerged on the global stage as a force to be reckoned with. Also known as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and Daash (it’s acronym in Arabic), the group was formerly partnered with al-Qaeda, but split off in February 2014. It has since captured swathes of territory in northern Iraq and Syria, and grown its network into a $3 billion dollar entity that has captured the world’s attention with its relentless brutality.

The IS’s reach is facilitated by military campaigning, but also by its Internet and media presence. It has released several official statements, calling for people to join the ranks and to commit “lone-wolf attacks” in their own countries. The IS cited a desire to undo the WWI-era Sykes Picot agreement, and outlined a plan to rule over the Muslim world, starting with territory in the Levant region, which includes Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus and parts of southern Turkey.

In addition to written statements, ISIS has created several recruitment movies, including an hour-long Hollywood-style propaganda film, Flames of War: Fighting Has Just Begun, (think booming voice over, slow-motion explosions). ISIS disseminated its message through various social media platforms, clearly targeting a young demographic.

The IS’s theatrical tactics have provided ample fodder for sensationalist media outlets to sink their teeth into. Upon capturing two American hostages and one Briton, the IS filmed confessions and executions of their victims, and then released these videos online. The day after American journalist James Foley was filmed being beheaded, the covers of both the New York Post and the Daily News featured screen grabs from the video, with Foley bound and clad in an orange jumpsuit, and an ISIS militant in a black ninja getup holding a knife to his neck. The image was captioned with huge white block letters: “SAVAGES.” Much like post-9/11 descriptions of al-Qaeda, depictions of ISIS as “blood-thirsty” and “monsters” have since pervaded mainstream Western media rhetoric.

This diffuse nature of this militant group, bound together by ideology and online chat forums, poses unique challenges to conventional security mechanisms. Confronted with the pressing questions of homegrown threats, authorities are scrambling to quell potential terror activities from within their own countries. Governments also deal with the risk management of citizens who have joined up with extremists in the region and are intending to bring the fight home. Startling figures about international involvement have surfaced in recent weeks: according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR), there are up to 11,000 foreign fighters in Syria alone.

And these threats aren’t too far down the line. ISIS has already established several footholds worldwide. In early August, Moroccan and Spanish authorities collaborated in the bust of a terrorist network in Morocco. Nine Moroccan citi-

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NEWS

zens were arrested, suspected of recruiting and training young men to handle weaponry and make explosives for IS. According to Spain’s Interior Ministry, “plans for attacks within Morocco [have] also been found...the dismantled network was dedicated to the recruitment, financial support, and dispatch of jihadists for the terrorist organization [IS]." In subsequent weeks, Morocco demanded that Turkey impose a visa requirement for the citizens of Morocco, as the government estimates around 1500 Moroccans have joined IS by crossing into Syria through Turkey.

Similarly, the Australian government has said it believes about 100 citizens are actively engaged in IS campaigns, recruiting fighters and grooming suicide bombers as well as providing funds and arms. After receiving intelligence that IS was planning public beheadings in two Australian cities to demonstrate its reach, Australian counterterrorism forces detained 15 people in the largest series of raids the nation has ever seen.

The durable and lasting impact of terrorism is compounded by the ensuing paranoia in security policy. Despite the emphasis on the particularly new insidiousness that ISIS poses, Western governmental action has also been eerily similar to legislation enacted in response to al-Qaeda in the early 2000s. In Australia, under proposed amendments to national security laws, disclosure of information regarding any “special intelligence operation” could result in up to five to 10 years of imprisonment. The legislation uses vague language like “special intelligence operation,” presenting few specific criteria. Yet beneath the rhetorical veil, to qualify something as “special” or “classified” should require stringent objective standards. In practice, the law allows for journalists or whistleblowers to be targeted for sedition and detained extensively if their actions don’t cater to the whims of the state.

With that said, preventative policy options regarding domestic terrorism are troublingly limited. One option governments are increasingly exploring is stripping citizenship from terror suspects, banning them reentry into their home countries. In the Netherlands, for example, the Minister of Security and Justice, Ivo Opstelten, explained to Parliament in March 2013 that, “Dutch nationals can be stripped of their citizenship if they have been convicted of a terrorist offence, provided they also hold another nationality.” In Austria, France, Canada, and other states, there is ongoing debate about amendments to citizenship laws, in order to dissuade recruits and prevent militants from taking hold.

The major contention here is that nations are bound by international norms on citizenship, which recognizes nationality as a fundamental right and statelessness as inhumane, rendering people vulnerable to a wide range of other human rights violations. Nevertheless, governments seem to increasingly approach nationality as a privilege that a person must earn on the grounds of public interest.

This debate is especially lively in the UK. Home Secretary Theresa May has managed to push through amendments that go one step further; it is not just a suspect’s citizenship which may be under threat, but his or her very belonging to any state at all. While the aforementioned proposals target those with dual or multiple citizenships, this statue targets even those with single residency. The UK has removed a critical safeguard that protected people from being deprived of nationality if this would render them stateless. These antiterror laws are legislating the rights away from people, robbing citizens of basic civil liberties, and exposing them to abuse and exploitation.

This tactic is far from novel. Government regulation of citizenship as a security tactic became unpopular after it became associated with Nazi Germany during WWII. In 1958, the United States Supreme Court struck down a law that permitted citizenship deprivation as a punitive measure. In Britain, however, citizenship retraction remained on the books, but was little used until after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The scope of the law has gradually expanded since then; May has refused to tell Parliament how many times this power has deprived UK citizenship from those with dual nationality, and how many of those cases have been based on classified evidence.

In a debate within the House of Lords, Lord MacDonald of River Glaven noted: “[T]his proposal is not only ugly in the sense identified so many years ago by Hannah Arendt; it not only associates the United Kingdom with a policy beloved of the world’s worst regimes during the 20th century; but it threatens illegal and procedural quagmire hardly compatible with the comity of nations, still less with solidarity between free countries in the face of terrorism.”

The reality of stripping citizenship, rendering individuals stateless, is that it removes government and constitutional accountability from the equation. Based on some unclear standard of proof, these individuals become immediate targets of abuse—governments can do whatever they want to them, no strings attached. Perhaps these measures are perfectly proportionate considering the brutality and growing power of IS. But perhaps, when addressing terrorism, we might consider adhering to the so-called Western principles, values, and norms, like the right to a fair trial and the freedom to voice an opinion without fear of persecution. As long as citizenship grants rights, legitimacy, and a voice, and branding someone a terrorist grants a governmental carte blanche to remove those rights, we shouldn't let such practices go unexamined.

CARLY WEST B’16 is especially lively in the UK.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SHELLSHOCKED making sense of the Internet’s most recent infection

by Elias Bresnick In April of this year, the Internet spiraled into a panic after the discovery of a security bug called Heartbleed.

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier called it a “catastrophic flaw,” and, attempting to contextualize its potential consequences, declared that “on a scale of one to ten, [it’s] an eleven.”

The bug, not to be confused with a computer virus, (bugs are mistakes built into coding that viruses then take advantage of ) was an error written into a security program known as OpenSSl, which encrypts communications between users and web servers. Nearly two-thirds of websites were deemed vulnerable, and it allowed the capable hacker untraceable access to heaps of sensitive personal information. When properly manipulated, the bug was a kind of virtual treasure hunt. Hackers could grab 64 KB of memory at a time from a server and pick through whatever they found—passwords, pictures, you name it. Eventually, numerous companies released so-called “patches,” or code written to fix program flaws. The threat may have been quelled, but a pervasive anxiety remains across the Internet regarding a new type of security threat. Heartbleed raised the Internet’s blood pressure to unprecedented levels.

Last Wednesday, Heartbleed was replaced by a more formidable foe. A new, more invidious bug called Shellshock was discovered by US-Cert, and popular techsite ZDnet was not alone in claiming that the new bug “makes Heartbleed look insignificant.” The basic difference between the two bugs is that while the first could steal personal information from computers and exploit it, Shellshock actually allows the hacker to take over the system itself. The National Institute of Standards and Technology warned that vulnerability to the flaw is widespread but low in terms of complexity, meaning it can be used easily by hackers.

Reading about Shellshock online is a truly mystifying experience for the tech-illiterate. The amount of computer-ese and techno-jargon on tech-forums is bewildering and not easily translated to colloquial English. Out of respect for those unversed in the abstruse language of the 21st century, here is a brief, comprehensible explanation of the bug that could be annihilating a web server near you. +++ Shellshock is a bug that can be manipulated in the shell command line interface Bash. If you already feel lost, don’t—here’s a translation guide. A command line is the way to give a computer instructions. It’s akin to having a text message conversation with the machine, so that you can issue a command to the computer that says, for example, move this file here or change my password, and it will do it. You can also write programs with your command line. You can put in variables that state that, per se, every time I type in the letter X, I actually mean a long and complicated list of commands that I don’t want to have to retype a hundred times. Later on, I can just press X instead of writing out mountains of code.

This is where the bug comes in. Essentially, everything within that given variable X should be treated as text, never as a command. That way, you can pass the command line text from the external sites without worrying that it will do damage. However, in this particular command line interface Bash, which happens to be quite common, typing a certain string of characters into the start of a variable trips up and starts treating the text as a

OCTOBER 3 2014

command line instruction instead of text.

The program that serves your webpage also uses Bash command line to talk to other smaller programs.

But if the input from the world—the things coming from random web users that can be sent to you—has been maliciously crafted to include that special string of characters that allow text to be treated as a command, any person on the web might be able to run very dangerous commands on your web server. This is known as “remote code execution.” Hackers from the outside can crash servers or potentially turn a system into a botnet—a system of computers that obey hackers’ commands. +++ Shellshock is troubling for reasons both obvious and obscure. As I write this, attacks are infecting thousands of vulnerable machines with “malware,” designed to infect systems in the ways stated above. What’s more, the attack is simple enough that even relatively untrained hackers can use it.

To make matters worse, there are more systems running on Bash than you might think. Upwards of twothirds of machines that connect to the Internet have Bash, and more than just computers are affected. Web servers, routers, Android mobile phones, and even everyday items like refrigerators and cameras can be manipulated. When the whole world becomes digitally interconnected, from your thermostat to your car keys, the potential from massive, systemic breakdown becomes infinitely higher. When a “patch” comes out, users can download the program onto their computers and essentially immunize themselves from the problem. But few will think or even know how to update more mundane items like routers and cameras, from which web data can still be stolen.

Any system that doesn’t have bash is much less likely to be affected. Windows computers don’t have Bash installed automatically, but Apple’s OS X operating systems do. I recently tested my own Mac computer for vulnerability online, a process that basically requires Shellshocking your own computer, and the results were as feared.

Hordes of Mac users are at risk.

The question on most people’s minds is “where is all this heading?” The answer isn’t comforting. Computer experts fear it won’t be long before someone writes code for a “worm,” a type of self-replicating virus that infects systems at an exponential rate. Veracode’s Chris Wysopal says it’s only a matter of time. “There’s no reason someone couldn’t modify this to scan for more Bash bug servers and install itself,” Wysopal says. “That’s definitely going to happen.”

Programmers are hard at work making patches for the bug before the worst occurs. +++ The most puzzling and problematic aspect of Shellshock is that the bug has been sitting unnoticed in the Bash program for about 22 years. This means any system running the program could have been exploited since the very beginning of the Internet, akin to a structural flaw in an apartment building that won’t be noticed until years down the road. The reason that should come across as mind-boggling is that our Internet security—confidence that we can safely put in private material from passwords to credit card information—has never existed. Theoretically, hackers could have been exploiting this weakness for two decades. It so happens that our illusions of safety

were likely conveniently accurate, and that the publicity of the existence of the bug last Wednesday was the first the hacker community had heard of it. But the questions bugs like Shellshock and Heartbleeed raise are daunting.

A huge portion of early Internet development came at the hands of enthusiasts and volunteers. A lot of the commercial tools that both corporations and individual users now depend upon were built on top of programs maintained by a few unpaid volunteers in what is known as the open-source community. The consequence has been that the very building blocks underneath the sleek surface of modern websites bear the mark of a more primitive, trusting past. The early manufacturing of code that worked, but not necessarily securely, built the modern palace of the Internet on disturbingly shoddy foundations.

Even while industries make billions of dollars off of this establishment, companies the likes of Google and Amazon reinvest little of their profits to improve the structural foundations that make their systems possible.

Up until a few days ago, there was one sole person in charge of upkeep on Bash, a system built into more than 70 percent of machines that connect to the Internet. His name is Chet Ramey, and he has worked on Bash for 22 years as a hobby without pay.

That the problem of general Internet security should rest in the hands of a few volunteers may seem shocking to the average user. But to computer programmers, it’s old hat. Programs like Bash are examples of “open-source” software, software that is made available to the Internet community to study, change, and distribute to anyone and for any purpose. The idea behind the open-source movement is that freedom from patents and copyright makes the Internet run more smoothly. The motivating impulse is not profitability, but collective advancement.

According to a study conducted by the Standish Group, “open-source software has resulted in about $60 billion per year in savings to consumers.” The program is public and collaborative, and the theory of security behind it is that “many eyes” working together will root out any bugs and safety issues.

Last year when Heartbleed came out, a coalition of major tech companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon joined together to support some of the more important pieces of open source software. But Bash wasn’t on the list. As open source developer Meredith J. Patterson wrote last week, “These bugs that happen… aren’t one-off problems. They’re systemic.” The lack of formal checks on programs that are at the core of the Internet is more than disconcerting, as the individual user is often unaware of their own vulnerability. It’s been a week since Shellshock was first discovered. By now, patches have been issued and most major systems have been secured. If you see that bothersome updates alert in the top-right corner, that is likely the antidote for your vulnerable machine.

We can’t know when another problem of this sort will appear again, but without widespread reform of the way we monitor the very foundations of the Internet, our illusions of safety are nothing more than heartfelt desires, and the bleed may have only just begun.

ELIAS BRESNICK B’17 is a bleeding heart cyberliberatarian.

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THE GIRL WITH THE SERPENTINE ARM Jo-Jo Cranfield stares boldly at the camera as a twelve-foot long albino python wraps itself around her prostrate, bikini-clad body. Her raised eyebrows and pursed red lips dare you to question the situation. A second snake—this one green—loops its body in tidy coils around her left forearm. Its skin, subtly speckled with red, matches Jo-Jo’s pillarbox red bob and scarlet fingernails. Its thin tail pierces the soft skin on the underside of her wrist and slides into her flesh—a surreal needle and thread, like something directly out of a David Cronenberg film.

The first snake is real. The second, and the forearm it’s draped around, are made of silicon. But the snake-adorned arm is not a movie prop—although filmic special effects did inspire its design—it’s a prosthesis. The 21-year-old Jo-Jo is a congenital amputee, born without a left forearm or elbow. Throughout her life, Jo-Jo has amassed a collection of plastic arms, each with immovable fingers and unconvincingly even coloring, each as functionless and fake-looking as the one before. All of her arms aimed at invisibility and, failing that, were consigned to a box beneath the stairs or reserved for particularly cruel Halloween pranks.

This new limb, designed and photographed by The Alternative Limb Project, is the first she’s elected to wear. This limb, for a change, refuses to be contained. Slithering up and down her arm, it proudly flaunts its artificiality. +++ The London-based Alternative Limb Project is at the forefront of innovative prosthetic design, creating bold, bespoke limbs for amputees across the United Kingdom. The studio’s founder, Sophie de Oliveira Barata, studied special effects prosthetics for TV and film before spending eight years making realistic-looking limbs for a major prosthetics provider in the UK. Although she continues to craft realistic appendages from silicon and human hair, what sets her studio apart are her “alternative limbs.” These slot into two categories: “surreal limbs” which combine realism with dream-like elements—picture a henna tattoo arm whose pattern never fades, a shoulder erupting with bird feathers, bionic components set into skin—and “unreal limbs,” that barely resemble human limbs and instead emphasize graphics, unusual textures, or even pieces of technology—imagine a leather arm with all the gadgets of a pocket watch tucked inside the fingers, a Japanese vase come to life as a leg, or a child-sized leg, layered with drawers to store a young girl’s stickers, pens, and glitter.

One such “unreal limb” is the “stereo leg,” designed for model and performing artist Viktoria de Modesta. The leather-coated, below-knee limb is fitted with a set of speakers and adorned with crystals, carefully placed so as to mirror the musculature of a natural leg. The leg’s titanium pole is exposed and ornamented with even more bling. The toes sparkle, too. In photographs, Modesta wears the leg with a futuristic plastic dress, patent leather heels, and a voluminous up-do—no jewelery needed.

“The first time I wore a limb that was so obviously BIONIC, it gave me a total sense of uniqueness and feeling of mutant human in the best way possible,” writes Modesta, in a testament posted on The Alternative Limb Project’s website. “It was really fascinating watching people’s reactions...the ideas they might have of what an amputee might look like or act like is, in most cases, negative. So when they clock my appearance and see the leg, it’s very challenging for them.”

Bold limbs convert prosthetic limbs into an accessory, an ornament, an addition, a chance to distinguish oneself in a positive way. But they remain a rarity. +++ “The priority for design for disability,” writes Graham Pullin, author of Design Meets Disability, “has traditionally been to enable, while attracting as little attention as possible.”

With the notable exception of glasses, this priority holds true today. Hearing aids are molded from pink plastic to blend in with white skin, braille is placed beneath existing signs so as not to disrupt the visual flow of public spaces, and wheelchair design continues to privilege function over form, channeling the mountain bike aesthetic but remaining largely uninfluenced by the dynamic world of chair design.

When it comes to prosthetic limbs, the dominant thinking is that a new limb should be as close to the old or absent limb as possible. A prosthesis, so the attitude goes, should realistically mirror both the movement and appearance of a natural limb. It should be simultaneously functional and subtle. In other words, invisible.

In recent years, prosthetic limbs have advanced greatly in the direction of realism, with the development of bionic limbs and prosthetic skin. Yet, within the bounds of today’s technology, prosthetics can still only achieve one of the two necessary facets of realism at a time: they can either look realistic or move realistically, but never both. Prosthetic design is stuck in a tug-o-war between form and functionality where advances in either direction cause losses to the other. The result is an uncanny middle ground where limbs are not quite invisible but still trying to blend in.

Even the highest quality limbs face this dilemma. Sophie de Oliveira Barata’s realistic line of limbs are uncanny in their imitation, mirroring actual appendages down to the last freckle, wrinkle, and even faint half-moon on the surface of the fingernail. Looking at photographs on The Alternative Limb Project website where her silicon creations sit alongside the corresponding real limb of their wearer, the only visible difference between the two appendages is that the artificial hands, feet, and arms end abruptly in midair.

Once in motion, however, this sense of realism dissolves, as her prosthetics have fixed

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by Stephanie Hayes illustration by Maya Sorabjee

wrists and immovable fingers and toes.

The same applies to bionic limbs. The DEKA arm system, affectionately dubbed “Luke” after the Star Wars protagonist, received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in May of 2014 and is one of the most advanced bionic limbs currently available. Roughly the size and weight of a natural adult arm, this robotic system has sensors that detect electrical activity in the amputee’s chest or shoulder muscles and send signals to the arm, which responds by opening or closing the hand, or switching its grip.

Using this arm, war veterans who participated in clinical trials were able to use a key, zip up a pair of pants, and pick up a credit card from a table. The arm lets users perform dexterous tasks with relative ease, but, as the nickname suggests, it looks like the appendage of a Storm Trooper. +++ When it comes to assistive technologies, the desire for invisibility could mean a number of things: that the person doesn’t want assumptions being made about their abilities, that they don’t want disability to be the main topic of conversation, or that they just want privacy. Certainly, these are all explanations amputees gave me in interviews. Yet, whether we intend it or not, the things we wear project an image. And, just as bold specs suggest confidence, when prosthetics shoot for invisibility and fail, they are often seen as a sign of shyness or even shame in one’s body.

To borrow Pullin’s question: “If discretion were to be challenged as a priority, what would take its place?” A possible answer is found in the history of glasses. As the only assistive technology thus far to have made the transition from a medical necessity to a fashion accessory, spectacles are often held up as the exemplar of design for disability.

As recently as the 1930s, Britain’s National Health Services classed spectacles as a “medical appliance” and their wearers as “patients.” It was dictated that “medical products should not be styled,” writes Pullin. Even advertisements from the 1950s were directed at the optician, rather than the wearer-to-be, and frequently referred to the “patient” rather than the discerning customer. As late as the 1960s and ‘70s, British schoolgirls were prescribed transparent pink plastic frames, ambitiously called “invisible frames.”

Today, glasses are available in a range of styles and colors, and frames are named after poets, performers, and famous fictional characters—see Warby Parker’s “Beckett,” “Crosby,” and “Huxley.” Glasses fads are rampant. The 1990s saw a revival of “Granny Glasses,” those half-sized specs worn by the likes John Lennon and The Byrds in the mid 1960s. Then, in the early 2000s, the Harry Potter craze sent opticians scuttling to the backs of their storerooms to retrieve anything vaguely round for adults and children alike.

Glasses design has even reached the point where functionality is, at times, entirely irrelevant. Austrian glasses design Robert La Roche once boasted that not all the frames in his brochures were available to buy—they merely served to enhance the brand’s New Wave-inspired mystique. His promotional photographs show glasses exploding or dissolving in milk, and, more recently, employ a photographic process from the 1850s to create dramatic high-contrast photos. In 2012, there was a brief fad in the National Basketball Association where dominant and fashion-forward players like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, and Russell Westbrook wore lensless specs to post-game interviews. It was heralded as “geek chic” and it was “cool.”

Crucially, glasses do not owe their acceptability to their invisibility. The fact that glasses continue to exist and thrive alongside contact lenses, which offer the chance for complete invisibility, is testament to this. It was the move towards larger, more colorful frames and away from transparency that saw glasses become more acceptable. By allowing the wearer to “own” their impairment, bold frames are somehow less stigmatizing than the supposedly invisible pink frames pedalled by the NHS. But our newfound appreciation of glasses is not entirely due to their visibility, either.

Colored and highly-decorated frames remain a minority taste, and most glasses still sit somewhere in the middle-ground between “invisible” and bold. In much the same manner, bold prosthetics are unlikely to appeal to the majority of amputees, nor are they practical or affordable options for most.

When I describe Cranfield's snake-adorned arm to the Founder of the New England Amputee Association, Rose Bissonnette, she makes a noise of disgust. “I’ve spoken to many arm amputees and I promise you, they want to look as normal as possible. Leg amputees often have insignias on their sockets but so few of the arm amputees I’ve spoken to want this. They just want to be as functional as possible.”

Bold limbs often place limits on practicality and, as a result, become accessory or additional limbs. Both Cranfield and Modesta explain, in testaments on The Alternative Limb Project Website, that they reserve their limbs for special occasions. “It’s a special piece that needs to be exposed only in special circumstances to be fully appreciated, meaning on stage, on film, or as part of an art installation,” writes Modesta, of her stereo leg.

When she’s not rocking the snake limb at a club, Cranfield opts for no prosthesis at all.

Priscilla Sutton, founder of Spare Parts, an exhibition that hands artists old prosthetics to use as their canvasses, explained that she reserves her full-shaped, tattoo-look leg for going out to dinner, as the added weight of the full-shaped cover makes it too heavy and cumbersome for day-to-day use. Most often she sports a leg with an exposed pole and a socket decorated with a Japanese-inspired floral print.

Financially, a second, ornamental limb isn’t an option for most amputees. Most struggle to fund a single limb. Meanwhile, limbs by The Alternative Limb Project cost between $4,600 and $21,000, depending on the materials needed and the intricacy of the design, according to an article by CNN. According to a study by the Amputee Coalition

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of America, the average below-knee and below-elbow prostheses cost $5,000-$7,000 and $3,000-$10,000, respectively. Due to the addition of joints, above-elbow and above-knee prosthetics cost, on average, between $10,000 and $30,000. Some of the more advanced prostheses can cost as much as $100,000, such as the “C-leg,” an above-knee leg fitted with microprocessing technology that adjusts to changes in speed and incline and helps recreate a natural gait.

Due to the immense cost of prosthetic limbs, many patients rely on insurers to pay for their limbs, which, in the United States, is a convoluted web. Funding schemes vary by state and differ wildly between public and private insurers. “Two people could be insured by the same company and be missing the same limb but receive completely different amounts of funding,” said Bissonnette. It seems the only consistent factor is that each scheme will only pay for what is absolutely “medically necessary.”

This system means that bold, creative, or aesthetically-pleasing limbs remain firmly outside the scope of insurance funding. One journalist, writing for The Boston Globe, summed up this attitude perfectly: “When someone has lost a limb, Medicare and private insurers would prefer to buy the Kia, not the Tesla, an electric car that sells for $70,000 and up.” +++ While The Alternative Limb Project offers an extravagant and trailblazing look at the ability of design to redefine disability, more accessible options need to be considered—ones that sit somewhere between the poles of invisibility and bling, the unaffordable and the unconvincingly basic.

The recently formed Canadian company The Alleles provides a smart solution. Their below-knee prosthetic covers come in a range of colors and patterns, and can be simply clipped on to the titanium pole. Lightweight and at around $400 per cover, they’re a practical and relatively affordable option that allows amputees to introduce more variety and style into their prosthetic wear. Photos on the company's website shows a model rocking a coral-colored limb with a flowing coral dress and pairing pink spotted tights with a pale pink prosthesis with cutouts that make it look like lace.

It may sound simple, but for Priscilla Sutton all it took was a few polkadots to change how people approached her disability. “Color just changed everything,” she said, of her first ornamented socket. “It changed parents’ reactions too. Before, parents would pull the kids aside and say ‘shhh, don’t say anything’ and ‘look away’ and this whole socially awkward taboo crap. But when I had my polkadot leg, parents would say ‘I like your leg’ and the kid might wave.” She explained one instance where a little girl approached her at a supermarket and stood there in awe, not quite able to articulate that her spotted dress matched Sutton’s socket. “It’s still treated differently,” she said, of her amputation, “but in an excited, interested way.” +++ In a TED talk entitled “My 12 Pairs of Legs,” paralympian, actor, and activist, Aimee Mullins, describes a speech she delivered to a group of six to eight year-olds at a children’s museum. She made a deal with the parents to let the kids into the room on their own for a few minutes, so they wouldn’t be briefed or censored by the adults. The kids immediately descended on a table of Mullins’ legs, poking and prodding them, wiggling the toes, leaning all their weight on the sprinting blade to see how it held.

“Kids,” she said, “When I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house—nothing big; two or three stories. If you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?”

“Kangaroo!” one kid screamed.

“No, it should be a frog!”

“The Incredibles!”

“Hey, uh,” piped up one eight-year old, “why wouldn’t you want to fly, too?”

Across my interviews and research, I encountered a clear theme: it was always children who made and inspired bolder limb choices. An eight-year-old’s drawing of her dream leg, layered with drawers for her stickers, encouraged de Oliveira Barata to start The Alternative Limb Project. A five-year old’s decision to get Dora The Explorer printed on her leg pushed Priscilla Sutton to choose a patterned leg instead of a plain one.

Perhaps children can be taken as an indicator of how future generations will approach prosthetics, when the stigma that all too often surrounds amputation has dissolved in the same way as it did for eye impairment. Maybe a snake-adorned arm was what we needed to get adults on the same page as kids. Perhaps we will begin to see prosthetics as a realm for enhancement and creativity, for moving beyond the bounds of the body. For anything but invisibility.

“And just like that,” Mullins explains, “I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as disabled, to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn’t even have yet.”

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 dreams of a day when an arm and a leg won’t cost an arm and a leg.

OCTOBER 3 2014

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CONVERSATIONS NOT HAD

Considering the media coverage of Ray Rice

by Zeve Sanderson On February 15, Ray Rice was arrested for domestic violence involving his then-fiancée, now-wife Janay Palmer. On May 21, prosecutors dropped the charges of aggravated assault, allowing Rice to attend a one-year intervention program in lieu of possible jail time, an alternative that was granted in less than one percent of domestic violence cases in New Jersey over the past three years. On July 24, the NFL, led by commissioner Roger Goddell, suspended Rice for two games because of the incident. On September 8, TMZ released the now-famous video of the violent attack. The nation watched—and then re-watched again and again with increasing horror—Rice knock Palmer unconscious in an Atlantic City elevator. His single left hook propelled her head into the lift’s metal railing, leaving her sprawled, unconscious, next to her unconcerned fiancée. Rice waited to reach his destined floor, and then he dragged her body into the hallway, by the hair.

Generally, the media response was appropriately unrelenting, unforgiving, and irate. Little attention was paid to Rice himself, for the video both explained and indicted.

Instead, the narrative that emerged concerned the initial twoday suspension, which was increased to an indefinite suspension after the video leaked. Writers from The New Yorker to SB Nation castigated the NFL for doling out such a soft punishment in July, and many called for Goodell’s firing. Goodell maintained, and still does, that he never saw the video before its TMZ release. His defense was, essentially, that he didn’t know how brutal the abuse was. But did the commissioner of a league that makes its money off of grown men beating each other senseless need a video to know what it looks like for one of its men to beat a woman senseless? The media investigation of Goodell slowed and then ended, mired in endless speculation as to whether he had or hadn’t seen the video, whether his two-game suspension was driven by ineptitude or malice.

Plus, the NFL season had just commenced, and it was back to business as usual for sports journalists.

Surveying the media reactions from past weeks, I was struck by how this focus on Goodell’s motives forged a chasm between Rice and domestic violence. Yahoo Sports writer Charles Robinson listed the five “most pressing” issues in the Rice case; in order: who saw the video, the source legitimacy of the video, the legality of the NFL seeking the video, description of events before the video leaked, and the changing suspension. Robinson’s list embodies the approaches of most journalists—they analyzed the violence within the NFL ecosystem, not within the larger context of domestic violence.

For them, Rice simply exposed an internal problem—namely, a failure to adequately punish—and nothing more.

The gulf was most evident in Andrew Sharpe’s reaction on Grantland: “It’s not Goodell’s responsibility to solve domestic violence in society. It’s not the NFL’s job, either.

People who say we should be more outraged at the courts are right. But that’s also an easy way to let Goodell and the league off the hook. The problems in the real world are bad enough, but if we can’t even get things right in this alternate universe full of fake laws and uniform policies and codes of conduct, that just makes everything seem twice as hopeless. Sports are supposed to be an escape, not a reminder of everything that’s unfair and hypocritical everywhere else.”

Within Sharpe’s formulation, sports stand next to society at-large, and if there is interaction between the two, it’s one directional. Namely, problems that originate in society are naturally reflected in sports. And sports, not being the prob-

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lem’s creators, have the opportunity to briefly transcend them by “getting things right” within their “alternate universe.” At worst, sports reflect the status quo; at best, they’re models for change. This construction, though, lets sports “off the hook,” obscuring the dynamic interplay between sports and “everywhere else.” Like most of his colleagues, Sharpe refuses to confront the possibility that the NFL isn’t just part of a possible solution—it’s part of the problem itself.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “Domestic violence is the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control.”

How might football—a sport in which physical intimidation and violence is showcased, in which the most vicious intimidators and attackers are glorified, in which gameplay is described using rhetoric of warfare—construct a conception of masculinity that is linked to physical power? How might football—a sport in which the only women on the field are scantily clad cheerleaders who dance provocatively when their team successfully conquers the opposition—connect violence and sexuality? How might football—a sport in which abuse by coaches is often defended as motivation—reproduce dominance elsewhere? The relationship isn’t causal. Ray Rice and others don’t abuse women because of football—but they are part of a masculine culture that has produced and legitimated an unfathomable level of domestic violence, and this culture has both informed and been informed by football.

In a New York Times op-ed titled “Sports, the Most Progressive Force in America,” Timothy Egan writes, “There is more progress on the hardwood courts, between the chalk lines and on the base paths of our games than in the halls of power.” Jackie Robinson forced a mostly white audience to confront its bigotries; Muhammad Ali inspired “a conversation about pride and prejudice that went far beyond the boxing ring”; Richard Sherman’s denunciation of the word “thug” provoked a wider dialogue about semantics and race in the media. In each of Egan’s examples, he demonstrates that sports are progressive only inasmuch as the progress reverberates elsewhere, only inasmuch the game can transcend itself.

Goodell is only our primary focus if we understand sports to be detatched from the world at-large, if we approach Rice within the confines of the NFL, if we understand violence on the football field to be completely unrelated to domestic violence off of it. The media’s fixation on the suspension presents a diagnosis of the problem that is woefully incomplete, for it implies that progress lies simply in better disciplining future cases of domestic violence.

Speaking at a Ferguson teach-in at Brown University, Anthony Bogues said, “Flashpoints illuminate things that officially and typically are opaque or hidden.” The response to the Rice video felt like a flashpoint for football—rarely is there this much outrage at a professional sports league. But what was illuminated for most people was simply the incompetence of League management, not that football is part of a masculine culture that has produced appalling levels of domestic violence. Football does not exist in an alternate universe and it cannot retreat behind ‘it’s not our problem.’ That Rice was initially suspended for two games shouldn’t be our main concern. That Rice abused his fiancée should. Our demand for the NFL shouldn’t be to more justly punish after the fact, but to become invested in preventing abuse in the first place.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 hasn’t watched a game all season.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ENDING THE POLIMIGRIA

by Jane Argodale illustration by Soyoon Kim On July 18, Rhode Island resident Antonio Mejia was released after seven months in prison for driving without a license, a crime that usually leads to a single night in a holding cell.

“I was driving to get food, when I felt a bump in the road.

I stopped the car, and realized I’d hit a dog—and the police were right behind,” Antonio told the Indy. Antonio refused to post bail, after finding out that if he did, he would be transferred into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where he would likely be deported back to Mexico, his country of origin.

After months behind bars, sometimes not even let out of his cell for recreation on designated lockdown days, Antonio couldn’t believe that he’d been let go at first. “I felt a little lost.

First, my friends called me, and when they said I was going to be released, I thought they were joking. Then the cars came, and I thought I was being sent to immigration. But I was free.”

Until that same day in July when Governor Lincoln Chafee signed a new ICE Detainer Policy, the Rhode Island Department of Corrections regularly complied with ICE holds, requests to detain arrested individuals who are suspected undocumented immigrants for additional time. If law enforcement approves the request, they could be transferred into ICE custody. The practice, carried out across America, has come under fire in recent years for deporting immigrants for crimes that pose little threat to public safety and its implicit enshrinement of racial profiling, especially in Hispanic communities. Its effects on these communities range from fear of these holds and the possibility of deportation, to long stays in custody and added employment obstacles.

ICE holds have always existed. However, it wasn’t until the 2000s that the process became streamlined to the point that one ICE hold was lodged every day in Rhode Island. The rise of polimigra, a term used by Spanish-speaking immigrant communities to describe the collaboration between immigration authorities and police, was solidified by the establishment of the Secure Communities program in 2011 in Rhode Island with the support of state Attorney General Patrick Kilmar-

tin. This program implemented the sharing of fingerprints between local law enforcement and ICE. ICE would receive data on arrested individuals from law enforcement and issue detainers on those whose immigration status they wished to investigate. Though Latinos make up 77 percent of the country’s undocumented population, they make up 93 percent of all ICE detainers issued. The frequency of these detainers led to a fear in many immigrant communities that “a trip to the grocery store could end in being taken to immigration,” according to Will Lambek, a board member of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), a community-based organization in Providence that fights for immigrant and worker rights. Lambek regularly visited Antonio during his time at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), and Antonio credits ONA’s work as the reason for his release.

The theoretical trip to the grocery store scenario isn’t entirely far-fetched when many undocumented workers in Rhode Island regularly drive without a license, the very crime for which Antonio was arrested. The Rhode Island driver’s license application requires a social security number, excluding the state’s undocumented population from driving legally.

This exclusion prevents the possibility of undocumented immigrants finding employment that isn’t accessible on foot or by public transportation—that is, unless they break the law and drive without a license.

ICE holds don’t get exclusively placed on undocumented immigrants either. ICE has frequently taken a particular last name or country of birth to be enough to lodge an immigration detainer. In 2009, the ACLU sued the Rhode Island Department of Corrections for unlawful detention, when Ada Morales was placed into ICE custody for the second time as a naturalized US citizen. This had already happened once before in 2004. In the ACLU’s complaint in Morales v. Chadbourne, it states that “on information and belief, ICE Defendants issue detainers without a sufficient investigation to determine whether arrestees who are perceived to be ‘foreign’ (based on their place of birth, race or ethnicity, foreign-sounding last names, and/or English language ability) are in fact US citizens.” In fact, when Ada Morales proved her citizenship to ICE officials, they expressed their regret for the mistake but told her that it could happen yet again. The complaint argues that Morales was targeted based on her accent, and her visible Hispanic ethnicity. In arrest records, her nationality was listed as Guatemalan, conflating her country of origin with her nation of citizenship.

Similar lawsuits throughout the country have started to make local governments wary of liability, after years of complying with ICE holds. As of September 2014, 196 counties and 25 cities nationwide have passed laws limiting which detainers law enforcement will submit to. In particular, the case of Galarza v. Szalczyk in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals established a new standard maintaining that, since ICE holds

are not mandatory, the burden is on the local jurisdiction that complies with a wrongful hold. As a result of liability fears and increased pressure from activist groups like ONA, which originally publicized Antonio’s story, Rhode Island’s government has taken steps to reduce the number of ICE holds state agencies will submit to, though in just the span of two months the laws have been revised.

The law passed on July 18 ordered the Department of Corrections not to hold ICE detainees except in the rare case of a federal warrant for arrest for removal proceedings or an outstanding warrant in Rhode Island. At the time, it was the most restrictive state policy in the country against ICE holds.

However, this policy was only directed towards to the Department of Corrections and not to other state agencies, such as the Division of Sheriffs, which continued to approve ICE holds, holding detainees in courthouses under the Sheriffs’ jurisdiction. One such detainee, Gustavo Arroyo, a father of three children all born in the United States, was taken in for a DUI and is now in immigration custody after living in the US for 15 years.

A more comprehensive policy was passed less than a month later on August 14. This new law applied to all state agencies, but to activists’ dismay the new policy also changed the earlier requirements for compliance. Instead of only allowing those on whom federal warrants have been placed to be detained, state agencies can now allow anyone with a judicial “order of removal” to be detained, a legal euphemism that means half the people in Rhode Island with ICE holds issued are no longer protected. A warrant requires more grounds for looking into a suspect’s case than an order of removal, and an order of removal is legally not actually meant to be acted on until a thorough investigation has been conducted. For Antonio, the August policy brought back his fear of deportation back to Mexico. “I still live with this every day. It could happen again, and I may not have the same luck.”

In response to the newest policy, the Rhode Island ACLU issued a statement criticizing its weaker protections for detainees, arguing that “it will have the effect of unnecessarily harming immigrant families in ways that last month’s policy was supposed to end, and it will do so in a manner that has nothing to do with protecting Rhode Islanders.” This law does not meet the legal standards set by appellate courts that have heard cases against ICE holds, and organizations like ONA continue to fight a policy that Will Lambek says have driven a wedge between police and immigrant communities. According to Lambek, “With one ICE hold a day, many families have been broken apart by deportation. It’s often the primary breadwinner of the family who gets deported, so the consequences are both economic and emotional for these families.

There’s always been tension between communities of color and the police, but with these detainers, these communities are now living in fear.”

Though the July 18 policy indicates a willingness on the state government’s part to adhere to the legal standards of Galarza and similar court cases, it’s unclear whether Governor Chafee plans to revise the law again in the near future. In the meantime, organizations like ONA continue to try to fight the law both by contacting detainees like Antonio by publicizing stories like his and by directly petitioning the governor’s office. At the time this article went to press, the governor’s office could not be reached for comment.

Though nervous that he’ll be detained again someday, for the time being, Antonio is living and working in the United States. “Deportation is hard for me to think about because there are a lot of things I want to do here. I want to work, I want to save up money, buy a house if I can, maybe even start a business. I’m here to make a living.”

JANE ARGODALE B’18 has started to make local governments wary of liability.

OCTOBER 3 2014

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It’s spitting in downtown Providence—there’s a damp sheen to the streets as I pull up Fountain Street on my bike. I could hear the protestors from a few blocks away, whooping in response to the crescendos of the What Cheer? Brigade, but when I finally see them they seem tired, almost lackadaisical. About a hundred marchers are filing around and around in an oblong loop outside of the Providence Journal headquarters on this rainy Thursday afternoon. It’s a motley crew—a family, some retirees, some younger, rowdier participants. One balding man with a maroon tracksuit jacket bobs along to the music with a distant smile on his face, making turns far wider than everyone else. There’s a corporate villain looming over the day’s proceedings, ripe for incrimination, but the protesters’ picket signs are relatively peaceable: “Keep Jobs in R.I.,” reads one. “Re-hire Bob Kerr,” another. When the police briefly stop by, John Hill, the president of the Rhode Island Newspaper Guild and the mastermind behind the march, shrugs and shrinks: “Are we in trouble? I don’t want to make any trouble.”

It’s a story of corporate takeover: 22 layoffs, 40 more allegedly to come early next year. Providence Journal, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the US, has been bought by GateHouse Media, a media conglomeration that owns over 404 publications in 27 different states. Corporate management is nothing new for the ProJo—in 1997 the Metcalf family sold the paper to the Belo Corporation for 1.5 billion dollars. Then too, there were layoffs and budget cuts. Downsizing has been the modus operandi at the ProJo over the past few years—the number of employees has dropped from about 707 in 2010 to just 385 earlier this month. But Gatehouse Media is bigger and, according to some, badder than the Belo Corp, and a new corporate parent means a whole new status quo. GateHouse Media’s reputation took a hit last year, when management sent out a memo at two Massachusetts papers explaining that, due to the expense, they would no longer be able to supply staff with coffee in the break room. CEO Michael Reed’s 800,000 dollar year-end bonus, meanwhile, went untouched. “There’ve been a couple of owners over the past few years,” Jack Thompson, a retired reporter from the Journal’s heyday told me. “Seems like this is definitely the worst of the bunch.”

A promotional video on the Gatehouse Media website—think hype-voice over stock-image montage—declares that Gatehouse publications are not just local, but “hyper-local.” “Add to that a strong female audience,” the video continues, “and you begin to see the real story.” Then comes testimonial from an ad exec: “I always advertise in local newspapers because of the types of stories that people cut out and put on their refrigerator. From an advertising point of view, that’s incredibly valuable.” This is all to say that you and your refrigerator space, reader of the Providence Journal, are more commoditized now than ever before. But it’s also worth noting that the Providence Journal is far from a ‘hyper-local,’ or even a ‘local’ publication. The Journal covers regional, national, and world news in addition to local stories, and its website sees, on average, more than 1.1 million unique visitors every month—this in a state with only 1.05 million residents. In fact, the ProJo will be the largest publication under Gatehouse’s jurisdiction; new management will have to balance quality with efficiency on a scale they’ve never before encountered.

The union of GateHouse and the Providence Journal is not, of course, anomalous; the media oligopoly is ever growing. In 1983, 50 companies owned 90 percent of US media. By 2011, that

number had dropped to 6 companies. News Corp, for one, owns The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Fox News Channel, New York Post, and countless other publications around the world.

Still, there are models of publicly funded, independent news media sources—NPR, for instance, or Democracy Now!. But a lack of steady sponsorship means that fundraising becomes a constant grind. And as print media in particular becomes less and less profitable, corporate parenthood seems increasingly like the only financially viable way forward for many papers. +++ Back on Fountain, an 18-wheeler rolls past, the sides emblazoned with “Local Teamsters” in red, white, and blue font; the driver lays the horn on thick in solidarity. The guys from Coffee King across the street have joined in too, arms full of Poland Spring bottles.

“We’re with you guys,” I hear one of them say as he tosses someone a water. “You know, we support ya.” Jesse Strecker, the executive director of RI Jobs with Justice, looks on in a green fleece and baseball cap. He’s helped to turn out folks from other Providence labor unions—he mentions Verizon workers, and I see a pair of wait staff in all black, jiving with the six-man What Cheer? Brigade contingent. The scene epitomizes the crux of the issue; Providence locals have turned out to keep their paper centered in their city.

Gatehouse Media plans to outsource. The corporation intends to shift much of the work and many of the jobs in the ad makeup department and at the copy desk down to a design center Texas.

One protester’s sign bears a jab at this plan, referring to three local towns: ‘Pawtucket, Pawtuxet, Pawcatuck. We know the difference.’

The cuts, if financially justifiable, are worrisome. Hill fears for the paper’s future: “I would argue that over the last 185 years,” he tells me, with a practiced lilt to his voice, “one of the reasons the Journal has enjoyed the reputation it’s had is because the quality of pay and the benefits offered have enabled it to attract and keep quality people. And if you start cutting the pay, and you start changing the benefits, you’re not going to keep those quality people.”

Especially if you’re actively trying to oust them. Bob Kerr, a reporter with 43 years at the ProJo to his name, was one of the first to be let go. “It was over in 10 minutes,” Kerr told WPRI of his termination. “I’m still processing.” His forced departure has spawned a rush of support from the community—Jessica Rosner, a local artist, hailed him on Twitter as “Our own RI Woody Guthrie of journalism.” Rhode Island Public Radio invited him to bade his readers farewell on the air—in his brief speech, Kerr harkens back to the advice he got in 1994, when he was first given his column: “[Let us] hear Rhode Island talking.” He’s been an often-controversial figure at the paper since then—writing pointedly on Iraq, gun violence, and other tricky issues—but he’s also become somewhat of an institution. “The past 20 years have been too damn good,” Kerr said on RIPR, “too filled with kindness, and humor, and a spirited kind of madness to be simply left behind with tattered

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ends as I head off into unemployment.”

Motives for the takeover are clearly financial, but there are faint traces of a political agenda present in Gatehouse Media’s layoff decisions. Kerr, who was dropped in the first wave of layoffs, was one of the paper’s most decidedly liberal columnists. The lay-offs have left the staff void of a single fluent Spanish speaker, in a city where 40 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino.

Local community organizations often have to provide their own translators when members are interviewed by Journal reporters.

Only one non-white reporter is left on staff. “We’ve asked for explanations and they haven’t given us any,” says Hill. “They haven’t given us any kind of specifics as to who and why.” It’s difficult to parse the political motives of a corporation like GateHouse Media—GateHouse operates under the umbrella group New Media, which is in turn is owned by Fortress Investment Group. Fortress has a hand in everything from ski resorts to retirement communities to railroad tracks. The web of money behind the ProJo is intricate and expansive, and there may not be any cohesive political ideology to it (aside from a foundational belief in capitalism and corporate power). After taking on Democrat John Edwards as a consultant in 2005, Fox News actually accused the firm of funding the political left. Nevertheless, when I ask Thompson if he thinks Bob Kerr’s dismissal was partly a result of his political bent, he nods: “I think it definitely had a part to play.” +++ Lunch hour is almost up—Hill begins gathering the picket signs, and What Cheer? Brigade wraps up a buoyant rendition of “I

Fought the Law.” The snare drummer wears a yellow rain jacket and a straight face—it’s tough to discern whether he is concerned or bored. Thompson sits down on a bench, watching the crowd dissipate. I hear a woman say to a friend as she turns from the crowd: “well, that was fun.” When I ask Thompson if he knows what’s next, he shrugs. “We’ll probably do some more of this,” he says, gesturing to the dispersing marchers. Hill is vague too: “we have to wait and see how they respond.” So far, the response from Gatehouse has been minimal; there was increased security at the doors to 75 Fountain Street this morning, Hill says, but he’s felt virtually no pressure from management to quiet down.

This lack of real conflict is partly why the protest seems slightly futile, if important and well intentioned. Money has made GateHouse Media’s decisions clear. Talking won’t change things: “We had a bargaining meeting with [Gatehouse] a week and a half ago,” Hill tells me. “And we told them this plan [is] just a bad idea.

It’s going to diminish the quality of the paper, and it’s going to diminish the Rhode Island economy. And you can tell them forever and they just don’t get it.” That’s what this rally is supposed to be about. “Sometimes you need to show,” says Hill. “And by having here—we’ve got maybe a hundred people, out here in the rain, in their lunch hour, that says it louder and I think more clearly than just words across a table.”

But by 1:30, the sidewalk outside the Providence Journal headquarters is empty, quiet. The Teamster truck has pulled away, the Coffee King guys are back at work. Not much has been upset.

At 1:34, the Providence Journal posts a brief piece online covering its own civil discord; nothing much is said about the future of these employees, or the future of this paper. It’s not that the guild members and community activists don’t care, but there is a certain sense of inevitability in the damp September air. ProJo reporter Mark Patankin wrote in an opinion piece that these days, papers must “adapt or die.” GateHouse will most likely do exactly what they want to do with regards to lay-offs, outsourcing, efficiency, and maybe, just maybe, that’s the way print media has to work. It might be a ruthless reality, but there it is: these days, the press is only free when they’ve got a corporation behind them.

MIKA KLIGLER B’17 has a stake in your refrigerator space.

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by Mika Kligler illustration by Andres Chang OCTOBER 2014 SEPTEMBER3 19 2014

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LEARNING THE LANGUAGE

by Matthew Marsico illustration by Ben Ross That has been all. Should I throw in my hand? I am giving myself one last chance to penetrate the Within — using the medium of its language, the difficult “Northern Mandarin.” From now on I shall employ no intermediaries, no eunuchs; I shall wait for the opportunity that shall enable me first-hand to…say, or do…what? I have no idea.

—Victor Segalen, René Leys When I Google the words “penetrating insight,” about 3,190,000 results appear. You’ve probably heard or read the phrase, maybe on the back of a book, and you probably know what it means, more or less. “X writes with penetrating insight into [the Gaza conflict/ football culture/the state of pop music.]” (Googling “penetrating insight New York Times” nets 2.4 million results.) It’s one of those phrases, like “more or less,” whose actual words seem, at times, to fade into the background, behind the meaning we’ve associated with it.

But if we allow the words to fade unchallenged, we might miss something important.

Underneath words exist ideas, histories, whole theories of the way things work, or ought to. A not unrelated example: the word “hysterical” comes from the Greek hysteria, meaning, literally, uterus (think “hysterectomy.”) So on some level, whether we like it or not, to say someone is crying “hysterically” is to do the same kind of work as saying someone throws “like a girl”: it’s to link a whole field of negatively charged activities and dispositions to the unrelated female body. (Misogyny is, in this case, a category error.) Likewise, to conceive of thinking as “penetrating” links the pursuit of knowledge to, among other things, the archetypically male role in the heterosexual sex act. This kind of knowledge, if I am thinking, speaking, and writing carefully, could change the way I use these words, or perhaps whether I use them at all.

To answer a traditional objection: sure, meanings change, but when you throw words out there into the world, their meanings aren’t only what you might think or feel they are, on a conscious level. History exists, and its burden is distributed unequally. Besides, there is a difference between policing or self-censorship and deliberateness, carefulness. Part of what becoming an adult means to me is becoming aware of my responsibility to others, and I believe that responsibility inheres in our roles as users of language. I don’t understand how I could learn the etymology of “hysterical,” for example, and still want to use it to describe things I find unseemly. I do believe that working to understand the context our language grew up in and carries with it still can go a long way towards reducing the violence I might unwittingly commit with it. +++ Victor Segalen’s René Leys, first published in 1922, three years after the author’s death, is an epistolary-novel-cum-thriller in which it’s assumed that “penetration” is a good way to think about understanding the world. In the novel’s case, this question’s stakes are concrete and high: the narrator—like Segalen, a Frenchman named Victor—resides in Beijing (then Peking), and those whom he violently attempts to understand are the Chinese people themselves.

The primary plot of the book is Victor’s quest to gain access to a part of Peking resolutely off-limits, not only to Westerners but also to non-royal Chinese: namely, the Imperial Palace, or the “Within,” of the Forbidden City. And he wants access not merely for the experience, but because he wants to confirm his vague conspiracy theory surrounding the Emperor’s death: that to be Emperor in China is to be “the victim appointed for the last four thousand years as intercessory sacrifice between Heaven and the People on earth.” Segalen’s conceit here is elegant: for Victor to find the truth, to get to the bottom of things—as if things have bottoms to be (forcibly) gotten to—he needs to physically penetrate the inaccessible, literal center of Peking.

But the book is, from the beginning, a failure. “I shall know no more, then,” it begins, as the narrator renounces his desire to enter the Imperial Palace, at the heart of the Forbidden City: I must close, having only just opened it, this journal of which I had hoped to make a book…better than any imaginary account it would have gripped its readers, at each of its leaps into reality, with all of the magic contained within those walls…which I shall never enter.

For Victor (if not Segalen), imagination exists to be superseded by an absolute, objective reality. Elsewhere, he writes that his imagined book would be “more ‘substantial’ than any other collection of so-called human documents.” The fundamental irony here, an irony underpinning the whole novel, is that the reality he’s anticipating only exists in his imagination. This becomes a defining theme of the novel: the difference between reality and imagination, and the way in which imagination irrevocably shapes our perception of reality.

Recall his earlier formulation of his conspiracy theory: that the Emperor’s role is to serve as an “intercessory sacrifice between Heaven and the People on earth.” Victor’s Emperor is, essentially, Jesus Christ. Victor doesn’t understand how tremendously particular his vision is. He doesn’t leave room for the possibility that his imagination is distorting and Westernizing his reading of the Emperor’s role in Chinese culture, that the reality at the end of his “leaps into reality” might not look like what he thinks it will.

Victor lets slip the existence of this disjunction in his mind without comment: at one point he writes of Marco Polo’s travel journal that it’s “the Great Bible of the Exotic, the Conquest of Elsewheres Beyond Belief, wondrous penetration of the realm of the Diverse,

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with the title—even finer than all it contains—The Book of the Wonders of the World…”

The title is finer than the book itself because Victor is more satisfied with the world he imagines it contains than the world it actually does. And these moments are what made the book, for me, interesting. I found myself in a completely hostile relationship with its narrator. I mistrusted almost everything on the page, and it was through this particularly paranoid experience of skeptical reading that the ideas underneath the language began to become visible for what they are.

And the book is designed for this. Victor is stunningly inconsistent and unreflective.

One of the frustrations and tensions of the book arises from watching his pre-constructed narrative subsume the facts of the world he’s inhabiting; the journal format is particularly suited for this. At multiple points in the novel, Victor describes the feeling of language falling into an intelligible order: “Words which, at first hearing, seemed ill-chosen now take on the precision of a…a piece of arithmetic…a banking or police operation…” It’s a familiar paradox for those who’ve spent a long time studying a single text or writer: to understand the language, you have to understand the order or logic underpinning the language, connecting each word to those before and after; but the only way you arrive at that understanding is by studying the words themselves. René Leys takes idea of linguistic order one step further. We get hints of the world outside Victor’s totalizing ideology: the book is set against the backdrop of the 1911 republican revolution, the end stages of the Chinese Empire; and it is primarily through the figure of Victor’s teacher, the titular René Leys, that reality disappointingly asserts itself.

Leys is Victor’s “Northern Mandarin” language instructor, a Belgian himself, and barely older than a schoolboy. Leys’s progress into the inner sanctum of Peking life constitutes the main narrative of the novel, which Victor tracks with credulity and envy. By the end of the novel, Leys has allegedly impregnated the Empress: he has taken the logic of penetration to its logical conclusion. Immediately following this revelation, however, political power changes hands, and Leys is found dead in his bed.

At first, Victor is suspicious. Did the Empress poison him? But in the last journal entry of the novel, Victor writes that, upon rereading his manuscript, he has established “with certainty the fact of my own guilt.” It was not that reality was out there, somewhere, with the capacity to displace his imagination, if only he pushed hard enough: René Leys did not kill himself. They did not poison him. And yet he clearly died of poison. This paradox is in fact the truest of confessions. The poison: it was I that offered it to him—and with the worst will in the world! It was from me that he received it, accepted it, drank it…and that from the very moment of our first meeting…

This is the conclusion of the idea that penetrating something is a way of understanding it. The force of the penetrating imagination irrevocably—sometimes fatally—damages its object. There was never any way for Victor to get into the Forbidden City, because even if he somehow found his way in, the place would have been changed so dramatically by his necessarily violent entry that he would not actually be seeing it; besides which, it is only at the end of the book that he realizes that the world as it is and what he imagined the world to be don’t harmonize. The world has pushed back. The book ends with Victor in terror “of being suddenly called upon to answer my doubt myself.” +++ Sociologist Alice Goffman recently received widespread acclaim from predominantly white media outlets for her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, about the time she, herself a white woman, spent living and working in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia. (The book, in positive reviews, was frequently described as “insightful.”) In her article “Black Life, Annotated,” in the The New Inquiry, professor Christina Sharpe criticized the work and its reception. Sharpe writes, in response to a passage from Goffman’s methodological appendix: “In other words…at least one year into her study, Goffman is unable to discern as class difference the differences among black lower middle class, working class, and poor people. That blackness made that difference illegible as class is one problem that should raise questions about what else Goffman is unable to hear, see, and make sense of.” Goffman failed to adequately address the impact her presence and imagination had on the information and stories she was collecting, and, by Sharpe’s reading, the book ultimately serves not to increase the general field of sociological knowledge but to affirm the resident meaning of blackness imperially occupying the white imaginary: to, as she puts it, “appeal to the ‘moral conscience’ of the dominant culture.”

I think that there must be a way for me to conceive of crossing borders and discovering others, of “penetrating,” if you will, consensually and eagerly. I think that I can become aware of the impact my presence has on the situations I’m in. By coming to understand the particular ways in which the burden of history has and has not fallen on me, I can better understand the world, by which I mean the worlds others are coming from. As Toni Morrison puts it in her study of American literature, Playing in the Dark, “I want…to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.”

But in a nation where wealthy, white gentrifiers are displacing and destroying vital, endangered modes of urban life; and in a world where nations like ours continually invade and colonize those poorer and less well-armed, a world with a mass media whose images force some of us, without our consent, into psychic states of violent self-loathing and invisibility—in a world where men still need to be told not to rape—it is difficult, sometimes, to feel that transcendence of the mandate for conquest is at hand.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

René Leys is an uncomfortable book. For one, while I was reading it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that “Victor” and Segalen were perhaps too close to one another for comfort, that not everything I found problematic with Victor was knowingly inscribed by his creator.

But another, more profound reason for my discomfort was the fear that I wasn’t quite catching everything, that I was letting things go unchallenged, that I lacked the knowledge to criticize everything that needed to be criticized. My imagination was affecting, coloring—penetrating—the world of the book, too. The paranoia I felt while reading René Leys uncannily resembles the paranoia I often feel towards my own imagination, my own memories and understandings of events and people ever since I began to realize that my thoughts were not exclusively my own: that my mind and heart have been deeply, perhaps irrevocably, impacted, and by political and cultural forces I’ve had no say in forming. In this light, its ending reads as a harsh consolation: a world of other people, actual people, people who exist outside our myriad, individual, disjunctive imaginations, will always retain the capacity to assert itself, to surprise us, to show us what we’ve accidentally made and the damage we’ve done with it; to take us out of the place we thought we were and throw us back onto ourselves.

OCTOBER 3 2014

ARTS

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BONI MITCHELL, live in seattle

By Lil' Meatsmack

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

TOWARDS A GREENER FUTURE? The environmental impact of cannabis cultivation

by Jamie Packs illustration by Margaret Hu A pair of sultry eyes sunken into a frighteningly unblemished face appeared on the screen. Beneath a wisp of smoke ascending along the right side of the image, it reads: “Grow Your Own…Learn How.” The ad called for some further investigation. I clicked on the link and was taken to a website called bcnorthernlights. com, which, despite some green accents, did not quite fit the confused aesthetic that I had expected. The website was clean and professional, hawking growing apparatuses with names like “the BloomBox” or “the Producer.” They looked to my untrained eye like mini-fridges from a college dorm. In a section titled “Learn to Grow,” the website urged the online viewer to “Take Control. Grow Indoors” in bold lettering.

Underneath, it elaborated: “Through controlling every aspect, you can give your plants all the TLC they need so that they can grow into the healthiest, most abundant crop.”

Bcnorthernlights exemplifies a familiar culture shift in the marijuana industry: the indoor cultivation of cannabis is coming into vogue as an increasing desire for control over the crop takes root. But what are the implications of “taking control,” of this unique brand of TLC for THC? According to recent studies, indoor growing may be massively detrimental to the earth. “One average kilogram of final product is associated with 4600 kg of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, or that of three million average US cars when aggregated across all national production,” says Evan Mills, Ph.D., of the University of California and US Department of Energy, in a 2012 peer-reviewed article titled “The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production.” Hidden beneath the dense haze of legal and ethical concerns, the environmental impacts of our green friend have gone unnoticed. +++ Marijuana laws are complex. Only the most devoted to the cause are able to keep up with the ever-changing legal subtleties that vary from state to state. By and large, however, the cultivation of any amount of cannabis is considered a felony.

And while there are a number of states that permit some level of cultivation, it is not federally approved. In Rhode Island, the cultivation of marijuana is only permitted for medicinal use, and those who qualify are only able to grow up to 12 plants. This legally prescribed amount pales in comparison to the output of any profitable growing operation, and the plants must be grown indoors. Otherwise, Rhode Island state legislation lumps cannabis cultivation in the same legal category as distribution, and the discovery of non-medicinal growing practices can result in prison sentences ranging anywhere from two years to life. Thus, the appeal of sequestering oneself indoors is understandable.

The environmental impacts of our nation’s reefer madness are unquestionably alarming. Evan Mills’s study plainly exposes this fact, ultimately estimating the energy used in this (mostly) illicit process to be around one percent of the United States’s national electricity use, or about six billion dollars per year. The energy implications of this mode of production are vast, and the laundry list of industrial equipment used is frightening: mechanically ventilated light fixtures, high intensity lamps, dehumidifiers, CO2 generators, water purifiers.

The list goes on. While not all indoor growing operations are quite this technologically advanced, it is impossible to effectively grow marijuana indoors without leaving a substantial carbon footprint.

Mills points to the fact that when California legalized cultivation of cannabis for medicinal purposes, the per-capita residential energy use in Humboldt County increased by 50 percent. And while correlation is not necessarily causation, the evidence of marijuana’s sizeable energy impact is compelling.

Ultimately, the study concluded that the indoor production of marijuana expends approximately 22 billion kilowatt-hours of energy per year. While this number is only one-sixth of the amount of annual energy used by refrigerators in the US, the American government has the ability regulate the energy use of everyday household appliances. The environmental harms

OCTOBER 3 2014

of an industry that is technically illegal, however, proceed uncontrolled. Besides, this is a shocking quantity for such a supposedly radical recreation. Not every American home with a fridge is also harboring an illicit pot-growing operation in its basement. +++ One solution to this environmental problem seems simple: why don’t we just grow our marijuana outdoors? Even though it cuts down significantly on energy usage, outdoor growing presents comparable threats to the environment.

Outdoor marijuana farming draws many of the same criticisms as large-scale industrial agriculture. Monoculture farming—in which only one crop is grown—relies heavily on pesticides, as it eschews the natural pest barriers typically associated with more diverse systems of planting. This results in pests who are more capable of adapting to pesticides (“superpests”) and the subsequent use of more pesticides in order to kill them off.

While marijuana farms are nowhere near the size of industrial monocultures, they employ a similar set of practices largely stemming from the perceived value of their crop.

Given the intensely precious nature of each one of these plants, marijuana growers are, by and large, willing to use as many pesticides as it will take to defend their crop. A hungry rat could cost a farmer $2,000 a plant, easily. Without any sort of environmental standard around growing practices, these tendencies have the capacity to spin out of control.

The effect that these chemicals have when volatilized by smoking is unknown.The impact that these chemicals have on other species, however, is well documented and still overlooked. Zuckerman discusses how chemical runoff into rivers caused a growth of toxic patches of algae, which killed four dogs that ingested it.

The water use inherent in marijuana production is also having an effect on local species. During bright summer months, cannabis plants require several gallons of water per day in order to maintain their luster. Thousands of additional water-consuming plants are therefore not ideal for an area already suffering from extreme drought conditions. Zuckerman’s article cites how the California Department of Fish and Wildlife likened water used in cannabis growth to a dried up stream nearby, which presented a serious issue for local coho salmon who were already struggling to survive.

Thus, while profits are being made and the urges of eager stoners are being sated, the implications of marijuana growth are slowly corroding the immediate environment. Zuckerman equates many of these environmental impacts to the effects of logging during the last century. Yet, thanks to state regulations, historically unsustainable logging practices were curtailed before they were able to do too much damage. With marijuana caught in a legal quandary, these sorts of regulations are not foreseeable.

illegal, after all. Putting claims of heightened incarceration rates and misguided enforcement aside, current legislation around marijuana has detrimental repercussions on the environment that have gone unnoticed in the public sphere. Our nationwide ban on the plant has put us into something of an ecological bind.

This lack of regulation also has implications on the consumer side of the spectrum, where there is a lack of transparency between the grower and the user. Consumers of more traditional agricultural products know to a certain extent where their food is coming from and have a kind of agency to choose between different types of products. Whether or not they choose to actually exercise this agency, however, is another issue entirely.

On the other hand, most consumers of marijuana have no ability to “vote” with their dollar. Marijuana, because it is an illicit substance, has yet to coopt the kind of organic seals that are coming to dominate the modern supermarket.

While these seals certainly do not serve as a panacea to issues surrounding sustainable growth, they do represent a level of transparency that marijuana commerce utterly lacks. It is this lack of transparency that ultimately leaves cannabis consumers powerless in promoting sustainable growth of the plant.

That is to say, the beloved “locavore” mindset has yet to find firm ground in the cannabis community. Imagine two shadows lurking in a dimly lit alley: one says to the other, “Is it local?” Preposterous. For now we are trapped behind a dark veil, at the whim of the ecological tendencies of our friendly neighborhood drug dealers.

Beneath the rhetoric and legalese, our marijuana laws present a nearly impenetrable barrier to regulation of growing practices. The environmental issues with marijana cultivation are generated by political ones. While the current legalization debate is a back and forth between small government libertarians and economic opportunists looking for tax dollars, the environmental stakes should trump the rhetorical tête-à-tête between these tired political stances. For as these debates over the future of marijuana move at a snail’s pace in our legislative centers, the fluorescent lights of indoor growing operations will continue to hum ominously as growers of marijuana escalate their carbon and chemical emissions at a reckless speed.

JAMIE PACKS B’17 refuses to make another vaguely drugrelated reference.

+++ But how did we get into this situation in the first place, and, more importantly, how can we get out? “Even though cannabis cultivation has flourished under the ambiguous auspices of California’s medical marijuana laws,” Zuckerman writes, “the people who are best placed to serve as watchdogs over environmental abuses in their remote areas still feel bound by a code of silence to protect each other from the law.” Here we find ourselves with an even more daunting blockade. Not only are the harmful practices of cannabis cultivation going largely unnoticed, those instances that are noticed are being systematically blocked by the legal predicament in which we have placed ourselves.

While many of the environmental problems associated with the growth of marijuana are not unique to the plant, marijuana maintains a privileged position based on its legal status. No entity has the ability to tell these growers that their practices are harmful, and legislators are unwilling to accept that these kinds of practices exist in the first place. They are

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THROUGH THE DOORS A day inside Planned Parenthood by Hannah Smith

The front door to the Providence Planned Parenthood, where I’m a volunteer, is not locked.

Outside, there’s a security agent and protestors with signs and rosaries. Next door, people pick at pastries at Olga’s. Construction hums on Point Street. The second door, however, is locked, controlled by a nurse who works behind the front desk. According to Planned Parenthood, one in five women, and nearly three million people each year, have walked through doors like these in cities across the country. They come to receive cancer screenings, checkups, contraceptives, and STI testing. They come for body image, relationship, and gender and sexuality counseling. Only three percent of these women receive abortions. +++ It’s Friday, so the abortion clinic is open. By the window in the main waiting room, women fill out paperwork. They list their health insurance provider, method of payment, and medical history. Jessica (patients’ names have been changed for privacy), a 21-year-old patient, nervously arrives at the window at 8 AM; because she’s choosing to be sedated during her abortion, she has not drunk or eaten since midnight. After the paperwork, the nurse leads Jessica through a third door.

Beyond the third door, there are two inlets with chairs, pamphlets, and posters, where women wait for their blood work and ultrasound results. One woman pulls down an IUD pamphlet. It’s quiet, except for the sound of doors opening and closing.

Around the corner is the pre-operation room, the final waiting room before surgery. On a table rests spiral notebooks where women can write their stories.

I flip through them: I’m 25. Me and my boyfriend were trying to be responsible and we had an IUD put in. It failed. I am getting ready to move into my boyfriend’s house (it has lead in it, not child safe). I had a previous abortion in high school, just cause I didn’t want to end up like one of those “16 and pregnant girls.” I really want to have kids one day though.

[All of these stories are anonymous and published with permission of the clinic director.

Some of the stories have been used in Planned Parenthood’s Story Bank.]

The nurse begins the ultrasound to see how far along Jessica is in her pregnancy. Although an ultrasound is required for surgical reasons, Jessica is not legally forced to look at it, at least not in Rhode Island. While certain states require patients to see their sonogram, women in Rhode Island are not required to see the image or hear the fetus’s heartbeat. So Jessica does not look at the screen and the nurse tucks the ultrasound image into the back of the file.

Women in Louisiana, Texas, and Wisconsin do not have this same choice. Senator Mary Lazich (R.) from Wisconsin argued in June 2013 that requiring women to see and hear the fetus would provide women with more information for their “life-altering decision.” Fox News, in an article from January 2014, states that “advocates for ultrasound laws base the requirement on the idea that showing a woman the image of her fetus might cause her to have a change of heart about terminating the pregnancy.”

Medically, it is unnecessary for the patient to see her ultrasound.

I am 38 years old. I have a 16-year-old daughter who I thought of terminating too but I saw the ultrasound and could not go through with it …

Another woman, who waits with Jessica, shuffles her feet as she sees the image of her uterus move on the screen.

She and her boyfriend were beginning to get serious; she said they were excited when they found out she was pregnant, but they couldn’t afford to have a baby. She proceeds with the abortion, but asks if she can keep her ultrasound. The nurse photocopies it for her.

The ultrasound is important for the doctor: if it has been less than nine weeks since a

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woman’s last period, she can take a pill called mifepristone to terminate her pregnancy.

This pill—also referred to as a medical abortion—can cost from $300 to $800. Mifepristone is a single pill taken in the clinic that blocks the hormone progesterone, which ends the pregnancy. In two days, a woman will take another pill at home, called misoprostol, causing bleeding and cramping. Despite the discomfort, the woman still avoids invasive surgical procedure. The medical abortion is 97 percent effective, and the patient must have a follow-up appointment to confirm that the abortion is complete. However, Jessica’s ultrasound shows that she is in her second trimester, and will need to have an in-clinic, or surgical, abortion.

Planned Parenthood offers a sliding fee on all procedures based on income, household size, and other factors. They also accept many forms of health insurance, and other state and federal plans. Rhode Island only accepts Medicaid for abortions involving rape or incest. Jessica does not have health insurance, and will pay for her abortion in cash. Planned Parenthood’s website reports that a first-trimester abortion, including the ultrasound and bloodwork, costs between $300 and $1,700, and sedation is not included.

Hospitals usually charge more. +++ After the ultrasound, Jessica walks down the hallway and opens the door to Harriet Singer’s office. Harriet is 87, and has counseled for Planned Parenthood since 1978; she has seen every president of the organization but Margaret Sanger. On her desk is an image of the first Providence clinic: the 1970s 12th-floor office, on the corner of Dorrance and Westminster streets, easily accessible by public transportation. Near her bookshelf are the two sequential Wayland Square locations: both in cramped doctors’ offices. There have been different sequences of rooms, changing political climates, and developments in medicine, but there has always been Harriet.

In 1978, Harriet’s job was to counsel women who took in-clinic pregnancy tests in the morning, and to wait as their results were released that afternoon. Often men came in for counseling on AIDS. She remembers eating dinner at patients’ homes to celebrate negative tests. Planned Parenthood still extends its services to men for STD testing and sexual education.

Jessica and Harriet discuss her marijuana use, her husband’s support of her abortion, her confidence terminating the pregnancy, and her two children at home.

When asked about abortion counseling in an interview, Harriet offers, “Today we can’t say it’s totally accepted, only that it’s accepted as a fact. Then it wasn’t even accepted as a fact. Counseling depends so much on the families, and the partners of the patients.”

Medical charts list the patient’s ride and their relationship. Support systems are medical topics for Harriet. She always asks about home life.

I am a widowed mom of three children my husband just died a year ago. I have been with/ dating my boyfriend for just under six months. I start a nursing program in September that is competitive and difficult to get into. It ends next June but I’d be due in March. Because their father died I have to do what is right for my three girls now… I send this little one up to my husband in heaven, and for him to take care of ours down here.

I planned on keeping this child, this unexpected, unplanned gift…my mother, father, boyfriend all want me to get this abortion. I’m disgusted in myself, I need to leave here. God forgive me.

If no one is listed to pick up the patient, then the patient cannot have sedation or anxiety medicine because she will need to drive herself home. If the patient is a minor, the guardian must be included in counseling. In Rhode Island, if the patient is under 18

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the legal guardian must give permission for the abortion. If no parental consent is given, a judge can grant judicial bypass. Often, when a patient cannot get parental permission or judicial bypass, Harriet suggests they travel to a clinic in Connecticut where there is not a Parental Consent and Notification law in place.

I am 15 years old in a few days. I know, young! I finally said yes to my boyfriend and this happens. 2 months ago I was drawing in my room now I am in a waiting room. I am scared and I feel so alone right now and god do I wish my boyfriend was here so I could cry on him. I don’t know what I am going to do but I bet i’ll be okay, or I hope at least. And you will be too. I promise.

After thirty-five years, Harriet still does not know exactly what to say, but will do anything to make it easier for her patients. Some women leave through these locked doors if they begin to doubt their decision. Harriet always walks them out.

The goal of counseling is to communicate to her patients that “choosing to end a pregnancy is in the normal lifecycle of a woman, in her normal gynecology lifecycle.” She believes her age gives her credibility and makes the women more comfortable with their decision to have an abortion: “If an old woman, like me, tells the patient what she is doing is OK, then it must be OK.” She ends counseling with a hug. +++ Leaving Harriet’s arms and office, Jessica turns the corner and proceeds to the pre-operation room. Through the swinging doors, she sees women wrapped in fuzzy blankets that have been lent to them by Planned Parenthood. Some are asleep. They will wait until their names are called. On the table are tissue boxes, books with titles like, 1 in 3 Women Will Have an Abortion in Her Lifetime, and the spiral notebooks. Most women open the patterned spiral notebooks with “Tell Me Your Story” written on the cover in black sharpie.

Jessica reads: I hope these stories entertain you because these movies are like 30 years old.

I am 25 years old. I am a student, a friend, a daughter, a sister…I was promised it would be okay. It will, and it will for you, too. May god bless you and keep you safe.

I do not agree with my self morally over this decision so I am asking you God to please forgive me as this is the best decision for myself and my father.

Don’t let no one judge you. You’re free to make your own decisions in life that will better your self.

There’s a half-written entry a couple pages after the last entry, “Reading other stories doesn’t help me. Probably because I cant yet tell mine. I guess there isn’t much of a story any ways…” I feel voyeuristic thumbing through these stories.

In the half-scrawled notebook pages or the kept ultrasound stored in a bedroom drawer, there is a sense of grasping at what was erased. At Planned Parenthood, women typically return to their same homes, their same families, but with an entirely new experience. The journal entries allow women to reach out from the often-hidden circumstances of abortion and find a network of women, all sharing this singular experience.

When they call Jessica’s name she walks out of the double doors to the left and into the operating room. She takes off the rest of her clothes under her hospital gown, and sits down on the surgical chair. The doctor introduces himself, confirms Jessica’s name and date of birth, and asks if she is ready to fall asleep. When she’s asleep, the doctor numbs her cervix and dilates it, inserts a tube into her uterus, and gently uses a suction machine to empty it. Then the surgery is over. The doctors turn on the sink and let the water wash over the surgical devices.

The nurse wheels Jessica out, around the corner, and into the recovery room, next to three or four other women.

I volunteer in the recovery room. I take Jessica’s blood pressure and squeeze her hand.

The nurse reminds her, as she begins to wake up, that she is at the Planned Parenthood on Point Street, in the last of a long sequence of rooms, that she will leave soon. Jessica says she forgot she had the surgery. She asks how long she was in the operating room. ten minutes. Jessica begins to cry silently and tells us that she is not sure why—the nurse tells her that it can be a side effect of the sedation. A volunteer pages the waiting room to confirm her ride. They call a cab for another patient. Jessica’s husband waits outside the locked doors, but knows nothing of the rooms she has been in.

Often women ask for notes for their jobs. The head nurse has written notes excusing women from high school gym class, graduate seminars, and butcher shifts. Not everyone’s commitments are excusable, however. A woman before Jessica goes through the procedure without sedation in order to drive herself to Wal-Mart for her shift that afternoon.

A woman told Harriet she got pregnant because she could not afford to pay for her birth control. She said that the price of her contraceptives was most of her salary as a florist. Planned Parenthood offers free contraceptive methods if the patient’s income is 250 percent below the federal poverty level; they offer to all patients a year of birth control pills, the insertion of an IUD, three shots of Depo, and a year of the patch.

Jessica is ready to walk out. The head nurse reminds her not to put anything in her vagina for two weeks, drink alcohol, or lift her children. Jessica takes two lollipops for them. It’s 3:15 PM. After fasting for the sedation, she’s excited for dinner. She thinks Chinese food. On her left is the door she just exited and on her right is the door she entered at 8 AM that morning.

I am 24 years old and this is my 4th pregnancy. I’m up vomiting can’t hold anything down. First pregnancy was a miscarriage. My second I had my baby boy.

These last two pregnancies I was on birth control and I still got pregnant.

Harriet has noticed that when a woman begins a conversation in the pre-op room, women are more willing to talk about what to expect during the surgery, who is or isn’t waiting for them in the waiting room, and what they want to eat after the procedure.

Even if the room is silent, in the book there are voices:

HANNAH SMITH B’15 is still reading stories.

Hello whoever is reading this today? I don’t need to tell you why I’m here today, all you need to know is I’m here with you. As a fellow girl I want to give you words of love and support. If this is the right decision for you then everything will be ok.

OCTOBER 3 2014

FEATURES

□ 16

PROOF

by Dash Elhauge illustration by Caroline Brewer

Claim: Demetri’s father loves him.

Claim: Sally will love Demetri if he buys her flowers.

Proof:

Proof:

Suppose there exists a mother, call her Jill. Jill has a child. This child is a budding mathematician, who spends most of his time trying to prove new theorems in a little green notebook while waiting for his mother to pick him up after all the other kids have left. Call him Demetri.

Consider that every child is born to a mother and a father. Thus, since Demetri is a child, he must have a father.

However, all fathers are seen.

But Demetri’s father is not seen, not on the couch licking his thumb to flip through a book, not in his study running his finger around a long stemmed glass, not in bed with Demetri’s mother—not anywhere.

Therefore, Demetri doesn’t have a father.

But all children are born to fathers.

We have reached a contradiction.

Thus, our assumption was false, and Demetri does not exist.

Suppose there exists a girl, call her Sally. Let Sally have red ribbon in her hair and a long black flowing dress.

And there is a boy, call him Demetri.

Consider that boys and girls fall in love.

Thus, since Demetri and Sally are a boy and a girl, they will fall in love.

Consider that girls like flowers, as seen in a Cosmo that Demetri’s mother left out on the coffee table. We know that the white lilies that curl around each other in the garden are flowers. Thus, the bouquet of lilies in Demetri’s right hand will be liked by Sally.

But Sally won’t take the flowers. Thus, Sally doesn’t like the flowers, and Sally doesn’t like Demetri.

But Sally and Demetri are a boy and a girl, and boys and girls fall in love.

We have reached a contradiction.

Thus, our assumption was false, and boys and girls do not fall in love.

Claim: The other children will like Demetri if he says “yes” to everything they say.

Claim: Demetri’s father will come back if he waits.

Proof:

Proof: Suppose Demetri says “yes” to everything the other children say.

Thus, if one of the other children asks if the seat he is sitting in is not his, that seat will no longer be Demetri’s.

If one of the children asks Demetri if he will eat the class worm, Demetri will let it wriggle in the sunlight and slurp it down, Mrs. Brudwick covering her eyes.

If one of the children asks Demetri if he doesn’t have any friends, Demetri will be all alone, listening to the screams of a caught football as he carefully sifts through brown curling leaves with a stick.

If one of the children asks Demetri to have a father, Demetri will have a father.

But Demetri does not have a father.

We have reached a contradiction.

Thus, the other children will never like Demetri.

Claim: Demetri’s mother and father loved each other.

Proof: For every reason that Jill loves Demetri’s father, Demetri’s father loved Jill. If Jill loves Demetri’s father because of the way he strokes her hair in bed right before she shuts her eyes, then Demetri’s father loved Jill for the way her lips stay so perfectly still as she sleeps However, Jill loves Demetri’s father just for having loved her.

Therefore, Demetri’s father will never have loved Jill as much as she loves him, and Demetri will stand at the window and watch his father in the snow until the final embers of his cigar fall, and he is gone.

17

□

LITERARY

Suppose Demetri’s father is very angry with Demetri.

If Demetri’s father is very angry with Demetri, then he will want Demetri to take a timeout, like when Demetri shattered the crystal bottle with the brown liquid.

Thus, Demetri must go under the graffitied playground tire to wait and run his fingers over the pastel names, wanting desperately to be one of them.

If Demetri can’t be found then Demetri’s mother will be very sad, and call his name into the night.

But if Demetri’s mother is sad, Demetri’s father will be very, very angry with Demetri.

If Demetri’s father is very, very, angry, he will never come back.

But if Demetri finishes his timeout before his father tells him, he will never come back.

But if Demetri does not finish his timeout, his mother will call into the night, and Demetri’s father will never come back.

But if Demetri finishes his timeout, then he will never come back.

But if Demetri does not finish his timeout, his mother will call and call and call his name into the cool night.

But if Demetri…

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Star Gazing Ladd Observatory, 210 Doyle Avenue // 7-9 pm // Free Open hours at the Ladd Observatory every Tuesday evening. There will be telescopes and people knowledgeable about them available to help you figure out what you’re looking at.

40th Annual Harvest Fair 583 Third beach Road, Middletown // 10 am // $6 Self-described “good old-fashioned country fair” with a mud pit, barrel train, monkey bridge, hay ride and “contests of strength and skill. ” Saturday and Sunday from 10 am onward. Supposed to be rainy Saturday, but that will probably make the mud pit even more fun.

Walt Whitman’s Life RIC, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue // 12:30 pm // Free Why was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass considered dangerous and banned in the 1880s? Go to this talk and learn more about Whitman, his sexuality, and why he was so heavily censored. Part of RIC’s Diversity Week and LGBT History month series.

Beacon: Urban Pond Procession 361 Reservoir Ave // 6 - 8 pm // free Big Fall Book Sale Weaver Library, 41 Grove Ave, East Providence // 9-5 // Free

Art installation on Mashapaug pond.

5000+ books, for $1 each. CDs and DVDs for $1, VHS tapes are 50 cents.

Frank Santos Jr, Hypnotist Faunce Underground, 75 Waterman St // 8 pm // free Consult Rob Merritt’s “What Happens When I Freeze Up” for a sense of what you might be getting yourself into: http://www.theindy.org/a/22.

Rough Francis, Happiness, Liz Isenberg & Ron Gallo Columbus Theatre, Upstairs, 270 Broadway // 9 pm // $12, $10 in advance Rough Francis is punk rock played by three brothers from Burlington, VT. Started as a Bad Brains cover band.

Nudity in the Upspace Devised Piece T.F. Green, Young Orchard Ave// 8 PM & 11 PM//free Personal narratives woven together with dance, skits and bad jokes are presented as an original piece as nude theater. An event is clothing optional to all audience members.

Kundalini Yoga Workshop Alumnae Hall // 11 - 5 pm // $40, $20 w/ Brown/ RISD ID

Walt Whitman’s Life RIC, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue // 12:30 pm // free

An all-day Kundalini Yoga workshop led by Sat Siri Kaur, Founder of Mt. Hope Community Yoga. Event promises to “help relieve our stress, stabilize our minds, and achieve a deeper state of healing.”

Why was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass considered dangerous and banned in the 1880s? Go to this talk and learn more about Whitman, his sexuality, and why he was so heavily censored. Part of RIC’s Diversity Week and LGBT History month series.

The Mystery Show!

As220, 115 Empire // 8 - 10 pm // $8 Monthly variety show: music, improv, sketch comedy, burlesque. Extra mysterious for the spookiest month.

Deadline to mail in voting registration form 25 Dorrance Street If you want to vote in the November 4th election. Get and print the form at turbovote.org.

Grotesques: Show by Ellen Wetmore SDWC, 26 Benevolent St // 9-5 // free First day of a new show in the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. Wetmore works with sculpture, video, sound and interactive art. Her recent work is inspired by the birth of her first child; she makes art that explores how motherhood is “comical, embarrassing and weird.”