The College Hill Independent V.29 N.8

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY NOVEMBER 14, 2014 | V29 N8

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 Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson SCIENCE Connor Mcguigan 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 EDITORS Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Caroline Brewer, Brielle Curvey, Lee Bernstein, Margaret Hu, Ben Ross WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Polina Godz MVP Sara Winnick

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 8

NEWS 2 Week in Review

haley adams & dash elhauge

3 TV Dinner elias bresnick

METRO 7 Crunch Crunch erin west

9 Black Yankee cherise morris

FEATURES 5 Moving Out sara winnick

TECH 4 Big Mac

patrick macmenamin

13 Sonic Park

connor mcguigan

ARTS 15 Buffer Zone katherine long

SPORTS 11 The Final Countdown tristan rodman

SCIENCE 8 Dippity-doo-dah elena suglia

FROM THE EDITOR S In Xining, China, there is an Italian restaurant called Casa Mia. They have two kinds of red wine and pizza with real cheese, the menu is in English. One time I walked to their door in the rain.

I took a train to Xining. The passengers ate ramen, but one girl had corn. I asked the workers for corn, but no, only peanuts and squid. A woman woke me to check my ticket.

I bought grapes from the market in Urumqi. They were hidden by the escalator and the chicken parts. I drank pomegranate juice for breakfast, then realized it was sweet, switched to fake Chupa Chups for lunch.

In Beijing, I watched Russia lose fencing in the Olympics. I read about Stalin today. I walked from place to place. And then—where have I gone?

–KS

EPHEMERA 14 Pearly Whites nana

LIT 17 pō-əm

mary frances gallagher

X 18 Ms. New Cootie layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

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 PAGEANTRY

by Haley Adams & Dash Elhague illustration by Eli Neuman-Hammond Quite a bit of news, these waning days, gets lost to the humdrum. Print budgets have been slashed, newsrooms downsized, correspondents laid off; “the Golden Age,” it seems, is thoroughly fucked. So for those of us on the ground, sometimes it’s necessary to dream up a display so extravagant, so dramatic that it can’t be ignored. That’s right—it’s the Week in Pageantry.

MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS

YEAH?

It’s Halloween. You’re driving 60, maybe 70 MPH through the streets. Your tires screech as you spin around each corner.

You feel every bump below you in the tight grip of your 1999 Toyota Camry. Oh yes. You are the coolest kid in your suburban town.

But what’s that, in the distance? A silhouette in the headlights. It looks like some sort of costumed man. What do you do? Do you stop? Do you wait to let him get by?

Hell no—you put the pedal to the metal, and as his bones grind under the tires, Halloween candy and feathers soaring into the air, you snag a Snickers outside your window without even looking. You smirk, never taking your eyes from the road, and tear a bite off that chunky delight.

Or so Karen Haigh of Fort Lee, New Jersey might have you do. This past Halloween, Haigh received a $230 ticket for not stopping to let a six-foot-four undercover cop in a Donald Duck costume cross the street, part of a recent safety initiative by the Fort Lee police department to make sure drivers don’t pass through crosswalks while pedestrians are in the street. “It scared me. I’m a woman,” she said. “It was a huge duck. If it was a person dressed normally I think all those people would have stopped.”

Well, some of us certainly would have stopped to let some guy in a Donald Duck costume cross the street. Maybe we would have even smiled and waved. “Nice costume,” we might say. “Where did you get it? How do you go to the bathroom in that thing? Are Halloween parties any less of a letdown in a Donald Duck costume? Are you an undercover cop?”

But oh no, not Karen Haigh. Donald Duck costume?

Please. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Not only that, "This duck kept going to the curb, off the curb," she said. "I thought it was a crazy guy..." And with good reason. To the curb, and off the curb? Why not just erode the very foundations of society and sprawl one foot out on each? Maybe some ducks just want to watch the world burn.

What you have to understand is that we live in a postPatriot Act world, even on the streets. The authorities can infiltrate our phones, our emails, and our beloved childhood cartoon characters. Ask yourself: is that really Goofy that you took your photo with at Disney World when you were 10?

Why is he just standing around outside Magic Mountain?

You’ll be happy to hear that Haigh will be fighting her ticket in the coming months, a case which your endlessly earnest correspondent feels will implicate not only the Fort Lee Police Department, but the entire Disney corporation, which has too long plagued our children’s hearts and towns’ curbs with oversized versions of creatures God would have made six-foot-four and capable of crossing streets if he had wanted to. Until that time, your correspondent will be standing with both feet firmly planted on the curb, chewing a Twix. -DE

By all accounts, Fulton County wasn’t going to swing the vote for the state of Georgia. The blue oasis in an otherwise red state, or so Politico shows, couldn’t stop incumbent Republican governor Nathan Deal from defeating Democrat Jason Carter in Tuesday’s cutthroat gubernatorial race. But that didn’t deter one Fulton County resident, Jonathan Smith, from hitting the polls last Tuesday.

Jonathan Smith, better known as Lil Jon, is near and dear to the hearts of the American electorate, with celebrated studio albums such as Get Crunk Who U Wit (1997), We Still Crunk!! (2000), Kings of Crunk (2002), Crunk Juice (2004), and Crunk Rock (2010). He also follows in the footsteps of American Top 40 greats Ashanti and Fall Out Boy as the spokesperson behind the most recent “Rock the Vote” effort, whose mission is to register and turn out young voters. In service of his cause, he released a remix of his jingle “Turn Down For What” entitled “Turn Out for What,” which features well-known celebrities promising to go vote for a variety of buzzwords such as “education,” “human rights,” and “deforestation.”

So we can easily imagine Lil Jon’s distress as he woke up the morning of November 4 in his Los Angeles home to realize he still hadn’t received his absentee ballot from Fulton County officials. He tosses off the covers dramatically, sunglasses already on his face, and flashes his grills in the mirror as he heads to LAX to catch the first flight to Atlanta.

With a righteous use of caps-lock, Lil Jon tweets to his some 300,000 concerned followers: “6AM FLIGHT TO ATL TO VOTE BECAUSE GA NEVA SENT MY BALLOT AFTER NUMEROUS CALLS!!! U CANT DISCOURAGE ME! #VOTETODAY @TURNOUTFORWHAT #ROCKTHEVOTE.” We breath a heavy sigh of relief upon seeing the orange “I’m a Georgia Voter” sticker on Lil Jon’s shirt in an Instagram post later that day. It matches his orange Ray-Bans perfectly.

And maybe Lil Jon had the right idea. Although absentee ballots make up a substantial part of the votes cast in a given election (as much as 17 percent of the vote in the 2010 midterms), researchers at Caltech and MIT have found that absentee ballots are more than twice as likely to end up as uncounted compared with votes cast on modern voting machines. One can imagine his explanation for where they all went: “through the window…”

What we’re left to wonder, though, is just what Lil Jon turned out to vote for. He claims he’s turning out for marijuana legalization, but the only ballot measures in Georgia last week were for income tax limits, reckless driving penalties, and tax exemptions for privately owned University of Georgia parking lots. -HA

NOVEMBER 14 2014

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SINFUL SPECTACLE Television reaches a point of desperation

by Elias Bresnick illustration by Lee Bernstein Last Tuesday, Nik Wallenda attempted a truly staggering feat. A luminary in the field of tight-rope walking, Wallenda twinkle-toed 1,000 feet across a wire suspended between two skyscrapers, each more than 500 feet tall. He did it without a harness or safety net, ensuring that one false step would send him plummeting to his death. Far above a boisterous crowd, Wallenda muttered prayers to himself as he slowly inched his way along the wire, a pinpoint on the Chicago skyline.

Daring, perhaps to a fault, his gamble paid off, as he was met on the other side by his closest family and friends. The walk was cheered by thousands of onlookers and 5.8 million live TV viewers. Not one to give a horde less than its money’s worth, he then turned around and did it again—this time blindfolded.

Wallenda’s feat marks only his most recent in a string of death-defying Discovery Channel TV specials. Four years ago he tightroped the Grand Canyon, two years back he made it across Niagra falls, and now he’s conquered Chicago. Other daredevils have also been featured on Discovery in recent years, including Felix Baumgartner, who broke the record for highest skydive ever two years ago.

Viewing these stunts, one can’t help feeling a sort of ambivalence. The spectacle entices, the ludicrously high stakes give pause. Guilt is inseparably tied to watching. One knows his viewership makes him somehow complicit: knows that the event wouldn’t be televised if not for him and people like him watching. Even if he’s not directly rooting for the stuntman to die, it is at some level the thought and possibility of death that intrigues. But, of course, one audience-member’s impact on the situation is small enough to allow him to forget whether he has any agency in the matter. The spectators quiet down and become the easily manageable audience of a theater—the stunt is the dramatic production.

On screen, the familiar cast of stock characters are trotted out to reassure us of the stunt’s value. There’s the devoted stuntman who genuinely appears to do whatever outrageous thing it is for the love of the sport; the understanding family who, though they know the danger, support their hero through any outrageous endeavor he sets his mind to; and then the sly TV executive who wants to showcase the stuntman’s abilities, and who admires the man’s daring only slightly less than he does the millions of dollars the event will produce.

“There is something just really compelling about watching people push themselves to the limit,” said Howard Swartz, Discovery’s executive producer for the “Skyscraper Live With Nik Wallenda” stunt. “There is an element of must-see. There is an element of risk. There is an element of awe and danger and inspiration that is very compelling and relatable.”

Fair enough, but might there be something else at play besides Discovery’s vaunted goal of pushing human tenacity to the limit? Last year, ad-funded TV viewership was down 4%.

Tragically, the average American’s 297 minutes spent in front of a TV each day have decreased by 13 minutes from last year to this. But where have Americans been spending all that extra time? Have they turned off their buzzing screens and gone out to convene with nature? Have they started spending more time in quiet repose, contemplating the deeper mysteries of existence? No—they’ve just started watching Netflix. Reports for where TV time has moved point to subscription video on demand (SVOD) services that offer instant content.

The rise of SVOD subscriptions has led to a decline in live TV-watching. Aside from sports and major cultural events, attracting mass viewership has become a challenge for

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most networks. The ease and convenience of choosing a show to watch without having to suffer through commercials has wide appeal to American audiences. Some consumers are now completely forgoing cable boxes in favor of a Netflix subscription or its equivalent.

The networks now seem to be trapped in a cycle of selfdestruction. Since the birth of SVOD services, TV networks have been selling their shows to these and similar outlets in order to make an additional heap of cash. Most wait until the show’s season has ended to put the episodes up, so as to avoid diminishing weekly viewership. But the past few years of cunning Netflix maneuvering has seen a subtle shift. The amount of cable content Netflix has, combined with its own very successful variety of original series, has begun to make it and sites like it a formidable adversary to traditional television.

TV networks have unwittingly created a Netflix Frankenstein, piecing together with their own flesh the very monster sent to destroy them. What could be worse, with pressure from investors to stave off any decline in profits, networks are actually even more likely to sell their shows to SVOD services in order to make short-term profits and try to patch up the ever-widening holes in their pockets. It appears that TV stations will only continue to ensure their own irrelevance by growing the already gigantic inventory of companies the likes of Netflix.

How can networks escape the vicious cycle they’ve created? The Discovery Channel seems to have found a compelling formula. Felix Baumgartner’s skydive drew in 7.6 million live viewers. Wallenda’s Grand Canyon walk brought 13 million and similarly colossal web traffic. As Brent Poer, a media specialist at LiquidThread wrote, “You create these stunts because they become sales vehicles.”

The compelling “nowness” of broadcast television is the only thing Netflix still can’t recreate. It’s for this reason that sports and news continue to thrive while sitcom audiences dwindle. The knowledge that a missed show can be viewed sometime later is consolation enough to miss the original airdate. But Discovery is finding that extreme stunts — some so extreme there’s a chance a person could die — are the exception. If you fail to see these events live, you miss the main attraction: the possibility of failure.

But how far can we take the spectacle? These events carry with them real consequences of danger, and if that very element of danger is to be the draw, how long before something goes wrong, and a daring entertainer is sacrificed for our entertainment? The model for TV strikes of a kind of dystopic Hunger Games-inspired future in which the only way to satisfy the desires of a mass-audience is to provide them with the mouth-watering, heart-wrenching danger of death.

And their next stunt won’t allay any concerns. Discovery has toed the line between the awe-inspiring and the gratuitously dangerous for a while now, but all that changes come December 7. Their next TV special is already being heralded

by news outlets as one of the most outrageous events ever set to be televised. Next month, Paul Rosolie, a wildlife conservation advocate with expertise in the Amazon rain forest, will be featured in an epic stunt called "Eaten Alive." The premise?

Rosolie is to be shown getting swallowed up by a giant Anaconda. According to the network, the event has already been taped successfully. In it, Rosolie wears a protective suit that prevents him getting digested by the snake’s stomach juices.

Anacondas are known to be able to consume living creatures whole, and Rosolie wants to be the first human to ever enter and exit the belly of the beast.

The symbolism is almost too rich. In a world bereft of morals, with greedy network producers only interested in achieving the highest possible ratings, with credulous audiences all too willing to indulge themselves in a gratuitous show of danger, we the audience enter through Rosolie’s head camera to be consumed by the ultimate figure of sin.

“People get bored with real life,” said stuntman Ed Beckley. “Kids need new shoes. House payments are due. Rent is due. Car payments are due. I don’t give a damn who you are, but you are going to watch these stunts and not think about the bad things that are happening in your life.”

Granted, but perhaps it’s not the Discovery Channel’s place to profit from a perverse fascination with death. In the face of monetary crisis, Discovery executives have gone to the extremes of entertainment. The only thing we’re discovering from watching these live TV specials is just how high the level of desperation is: showy stuntmen desperate for validation, predatory TV execs desperate to meet their quarterly goals by any means necessary, desensitized audiences desperate to see something that will hold their attention for more than a few minutes.

The world of Television has long lagged behind the Internet, where whatever is most shocking wins. But the Discovery Channel seems to be opening up new pathways for vapid shock-value. Perhaps some will have the forbearance to avoid watching the grotesque event come December 7. But as for me, I’m afraid I’ll be slithering up to the screen to see what happens.

ELIAS BRESNICK B’17 writes to you from the inside of an anaconda, which, surprisingly, has a pretty good WiFi connection.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BIGGER THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE Paranoia and privacy law

by Patrick McMenamin illustration by Julie Kwon

Big Data. Admittedly, it’s a great phrase, encapsulating every bigger-better progress narrative in a tight trisyllabic punch. As a term, it doesn’t mean all that much—merely any collection of data large enough to challenge previous data processing capacities. But its near blind invocation in media distances us from it, makes us nod our heads, awestruck at anyone’s ability to parse through it all and blithely toss it back to us.

The truth is, though, we’ve always swum in seas of data.

Walk down the aisles of any modern supermarket and watch as the generic boxed brands array into shifting apparitions of shape and color. Or even in the woods, try really hard to process everything at once. Of course we can’t take in everything; this is obvious stuff. The question then becomes how one can extrapolate from the sensory data one is given—how one can approach the whole.

Discussions around big data amplify a drama already taking place at an individual level—how to make one’s trivial individual perceptions meaningful in the context of others.

The rise of the Internet of Things, the touted next wave of the Internet economy, plays this drama out at a nearly parodic level. Referring to the connection of daily devices to the Internet, the Internet of Things takes technologies that are largely kitsch—a fridge device that reminds you when you’re low on eggs, an umbrella that glows blue when it’s raining outside, a jacket that hugs you when someone likes your Facebook post—as the basis of an entirely new economy. Total immersion in the Internet lets every possible need not only be met, but predicted. Cisco predicts $14.4 trillion in profits by 2022 from the Internet of Things.

For Cisco, the real value of the Internet of Things lies not in the individual benefits offered by the products, but in the data it produces—data from every nook and cranny of human life. Collected, analyzed, and put to use, this data becomes the fabric uniting all of human life—tying your egg-eating habits with your workplace productivity and the season’s climate patterns.

Imagine what could be done with the instant knowledge of everything’s connections. Whether the dawn of an increasingly oppressive surveillance state or of techno-communism, big data becomes the very texture of connectedness. It’s the self-serious thinker’s dream: uniting knowledge of everything that has ever happened with a complete presence in the moment itself. The collapse of critical reflection into the technological instant.

But don’t forget that this data is made, that it all emerges from individual experiences. If big data can link everything and everyone, then who threads together the fabric? Who holds on to the sheet ends? +++ “Privacy-sensitive elements may be only latent in the data, made visible only by analytics (including those not yet invented), or by fusion with other data sources (including those not yet known)” –President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective This past May, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report about the possibilities of regulating privacy in Big Data. The report, "Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective," separates Big Data’s process into three categories: its collection from individual devices, its analysis, and its use by corporations or the government. This process describes a cycle, where corporations separate data from individuals, analyze it, and return it to them in the form of new products and services.

The PCAST report concludes that the government

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should only protect privacy in the use of this data. In part, this emerges from a pragmatic concern: individuals already give away so much of the data they produce. In glossedover privacy agreements and unthought-of filler data—the GPS data produced between uses of Maps—one has already forfeited any claim to data production. There’s a reason this data is often referred to as “data exhaust”: it feels like a byproduct to us—who cares if someone wants to know about my egg consumption? But just as the invisible exhaust of a car becomes meaningful as soon as it combines with others and is trapped in the atmosphere, so too does data exhaust—added and analyzed—become something meaningful and useful.

And the uses emerging from this combination seem increasingly endless as data collection extends further and further into everyday life.

By the same logic that ties economic creativity to unregulated markets, the PCAST report opts not to regulate data analysis on the grounds that the new data processes necessary for big data can only emerge independently. The report doesn’t even see analysis as a type of use. It occurs in the passive voice, even as corporations and the government both collect and use the data. The data appears to organize itself, relying on its own connections—fusions “not yet known” to anyone collecting or using it—to create its own “analytic models.” In reality, however, this analysis occurs within the corporations who gather and use the data. And this analysis ties directly in with its uses, allowing corporations to use the First Amendment to even challenge the government’s regulation of use. A similar strategy of regulating use in the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970—a law to protect the privacy of people’s credit histories—has done little to curb the near endless applications of these histories. Corporations can claim use regulation violates the freedom of expression, their right to express the meanings found in data in new products, services, and advertising schemes.

Yet, it still remains incredibly hard to care about this data. The separation of analysis from collection and use makes it hard for any one data-creator to see the ultimate power of her creation. Funneled almost exclusively through corporations, this data merely seems to build into better Amazon suggestions or more responsive customer service—the products returned back to us in use. But what about the uses hidden as analyses? What about increased government surveillance, targeted policing, more firmly controlled labor practices? And what if we were to seriously consider big data as the connective fabric of everything? +++ “It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being dictated instead by the means of technology…by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war” –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow finds access points to the data of everything through an extensive depiction of paranoia. The novel’s characters desperately try to connect the sensory data of WWII’s ruins and make meaning out of their absurd individual experience. A wartime psychological agency notices that the locations of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual exploits predict V-2 rocket strikes in London, a leader of a separatist group of African rocket technicians begins to treat the rocket’s form as the “holy Text” of the war, a Pavlovian psychologist grapples with human conditioning sent back from the future. Paranoia becomes the only way for Pynchon’s characters to even start to glimpse meaning behind these wartime experiences, each character’s distinctive paranoia revealing unique constructions of data. These paranoias are validated in their ability to be put to use—to facilitate survival, skirt wartime powers, find others.

Yet, Pynchon’s paranoia does not follow directly from its

use. Rather, it extrapolates from the distinctive character of one’s experience. As the novel’s chief paranoiac, Slothrop fills out the novel’s descriptions of the V-2 rocket with his sexually bent theories of power. But even his paranoia remains incomplete: there is no moment of reckoning or absolute insight.

One comes to understand that the novel’s ellipses make this just one reading of the war’s data, that even in such a long book, a single paranoia cannot be fully carried through in description. Emerging from individual experience, this paranoia opens boundless horizons. At the same time, paranoia connects the characters as a shared way of viewing the world; it projects their personal experience outward. Paranoia becomes the entry point to the full data of humanity, the carrier of personal identity into collective space.

These paranoiacs come to see the War's ruins as being "in perfect working order," the War becoming merely a pretext for the self-organizing creativity of technology. While corporations have a fairly obvious interest in separating analysis from use, it’s harder to imagine why a rocket-worshipping separatist group would found this as the base of his resistance. Pynchon challenges us to understand paranoia as a creative process— projecting one’s own desires and needs into technologies and external data. The characters of Gravity’s Rainbow see their own experience as trivial and absurd—on the level of a Facebook hugging jacket—yet understand that this experience contributes to collective meaning. This contribution becomes their access point, opening up the possibility of their action within collective experience.

So who’s paranoid of big data? By holding analysis at a distance, it would appear that the government is. Within the PCAST report, this makes sense: only corporations and the government are really considered as possible data-collectors or users. For them, paranoia becomes a way to justify increased collection and access to data. Their desire for increased access expands outward under the guise of natural, self-regulating creativity within technology itself. At the same time, by emphasizing the ownership of private data, the PCAST report diverts anyone’s claims to analysis or access. And we already don’t really care about ownership. Privacy protection assumes an interest in the trivial data being collected, even as its real power only emerges in its analysis and use. This helps to explain why while it’s hard to be anything more than reluctantly amused to discover that GE listens to your lightbulbs, it would be uncomfortable to find your electricity being limited by your light-switching habits. Yet privacy protection makes this link harder to see. This plays out with incredibly high stakes too: think of the predictions in policy, corporate strategy, and military action. This data comes back to constitute who you are in the world.

Data’s collection, analysis, and uses have real effects on how one lives. But this only happens once that data comes together, once we see the connections. Paranoia becomes a way to not only access that meaning, but to represent one’s own stake in it. In Gravity’s Rainbow, paranoia’s access becomes the vehicle for collective resistance, understanding, and even romantic love. Pynchon’s characters think of data’s meaning as a process of movement—the traces of the V-2 rocket’s parabola—and not as stable possessions.

“Getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot?” Gravity’s Rainbow shows that the connections and meanings contained within any kind of data remain “incalculable” to the individual: one cannot grasp the entirety of any experience in isolation. Rather, in carrying the specific paranoid links of our experience into the shared space where these links congregate, we start to glimpse the movements that shape our experience. And in these movements, the possibilities of our action.

PATRICK MCMENAMIN B’17 can smell your data exhaust.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INDEPENDENCE Chapel Haven’s program for adults with disabilities

by Sara Winnick illustration by Jade Donaldson To pick up my brother, I drive 10 minutes on the highway from my parent’s house, take a right at the exit, and another right at the sign with the swirly sun. I text him from the parking lot, wait as he lugs his laundry downstairs and signs himself out at the front desk.

While I sit, someone rides past me on a scooter, CVS bag looped around her handle bars and "CHAPEL HAVEN" lanyard around her neck. She settles on a bench beside a young man with a matching lanyard. He wears headphones, bops his head to the music.

Joe, age 28, takes five minutes to get to the door, 15 to cross the parking lot. “Wait wait, that’s my buddy,” he calls to me, hugging the man with the headphones, shouting to a friend across the street. Once in the car he asks slyly, “Can we go to Dunkin' Donuts?”

I agree only because my older brother has lost fifty pounds since last year, when he moved to Chapel Haven’s residential “transition program” for adults with developmental and social disorders. Before moving to the brick complex on Whaley Avenue in West Haven, Connecticut, Joe lived in my parents' house, two towns over. In the six years after he graduated high school and before he moved to Chapel Haven, Joe worked part time, on and off, attempting to find structure and purpose outside of school, without the support of special education services. For two years Joe worked a few hours a week in a toy store owned by family friends; he spent a year filing papers for a neighbor once a week; for two summers he participated in job training through the Bureau of Rehabilitative Services.

Each post was temporary, and after his session completed, my parents returned to an empty drawing board.

Joe doesn’t have a developmental or social disorder like autism, Down Syndrome, or cerebral palsy. But as an adult with mental and physical disabilities, including a severe mental illness, the world outside our home has never been easy for him to navigate. Many days, his only exercise was the walk from his bedroom to the family room, where he watched TV for hours.

Now Joe walks from his apartment to the main building for classes, back to his kitchen for lunch. He walks to the bus stop to get to the grocery store and home again, where he cooks dinner in his apartment. He walks to CVS. Out of curiosity, I call the store to ask about Chapel Haven’s interaction with its surrounding neighborhood, picturing dozens of matching blue lanyards walking through the neighborhood on Saturday afternoons. The clerk on the phone tells me, “Yeah, [Chapel Haven students] do come here a lot. They buy things like, you know, basic needs stuff, like toothpaste and that kind of thing. They come here for a lot of snacks.” +++ Founded in 1972, Chapel Haven is a nonprofit organization. Its brick buildings on Whaley Ave serve as a hub for four different programs: REACH, Bridge, Supported Living, and Community Life. Ideally, members participate in programs on a path culminating in independent living. My brother is in his second year of the two-year Residential Education At Chapel Haven (REACH) Program. He lives in an apartment at the Whaley Ave facility and attends day-long programming from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep. Though it is only his first step with Chapel Haven, asked to describe the program Joe answers, “total independence.”

According to my mother, “One of the best things about Chapel Haven is how scheduled it is.” Joe explains an average day: “I wake up at eight o'clock; the lady comes and says, ‘Joe, your medicine’s on the table.’ And another lady comes and says ‘Joe, turn the TV off.’ And then I go to class and the lady says, ‘Joe, you’re late to class.’ And I say, ‘I was sleeping.’ And then I go to the first class and then I go to the second class.”

After his morning classes, Joe eats lunch and takes his afternoon nap. “After lunch then I have class until life skills and then I’m done. Life skills is when you clean the apartment with someone and make dinner. After I watch TV. Sometimes we have parties, but we’re usually just tired and don't want to do anything. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Kimber comes over.” Kimber is Joe’s girlfriend. They met at Chapel Haven last year.

Next year, Joe will move to the Bridge Program, remaining on campus with a more individual and flexible schedule. After Bridge, Joe may move into group homes in the surrounding neighborhood, as many Chapel Haven alumni do. Though he will ideally obtain part-time employment, my parents will pay the rent of his future apartment.

Through Chapel Haven’s Supported Living Program, adults living independently can receive financial, housing, employment, and health-related services from a “support coordinator.” Adults participating in Community Life frequent Chapel Haven for classes encompassing yoga, street safety, and comedy TV or social events like pizza parties, movies, and dances. Some affiliates volunteer in groups at places like St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen and the New Haven Public Library. According to Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo, the Vice President of Admissions for Chapel Haven, they serve over 250 adults in the Greater New Haven area. +++ The current landscape of services for adults with disabilities is a bureaucratic mix of public assistance and private programming. In the absence of a cohesive publicly funded system post-public school, it often falls on parents to research, fund, and advocate for their children’s needs after they become adults. Carol Albert, mother of Chapel Haven community member Michael Albert, tells me about eight different local and national programs, including The Autism Spectrum Resource Center, The Foundation School,

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and The Learning Center when I call to ask her about services available to adults with disabilities in Connecticut. She comments, “Well, you know, there may be a broad variety of programs, but the bigger question is are there programs that are either tailored or flexible—and knowledgeable and trained—to the particular diagnosis? Does it have the capacity to be individualized?” According to Mrs. Albert, those are the questions that concern parents and advocates.

Michael Albert and his wife Elizabeth live a few blocks from Chapel Haven. Michael has belonged to Chapel Haven for 10 years; he currently attends recreation programs and special education classes. Though Elizabeth no longer receives services from Chapel Haven, the two live in the same neighborhood and frequent the same businesses as many Chapel Haven adults. Michael’s mother tells me, “I think the community is truly very supportive. I always ask if [store owners] know Michael and Elizabeth and they do—they are respected in the community.” She mentions the local CVS. +++ I​ t is not, and has never been, typical to treat the mentally disabled with field trips and pizza parties. If my brother was born in the first half of the nineteenth century—his mental illness undiagnosed and untreated he might have been incarcerated, handcuffed and placed in a dark cell lit only when visitors passed. Early United States prisons charged admission from the public to see the mentally ill.

If my brother was born after Dorothea Dix’s massive mental health campaign in the 1840s, he might have been placed in a state mental hospital, and this would have been the most humane and positive option. Newly built American asylums offered clean spaces, medical and social attention beyond families, outside homes. By the end of the 1800s, hospitals were no longer humane or positive. Dix’s death coincided with large waves of Eastern European immigration and the Eugenics movement’s anti-disability zeitgeist. In the first decades of the 1900s, states legalized sterilization of people with mental disabilities. American asylums—overcrowded, under-resourced, highly stigmatized— looked once more like prisons.

In the 1920s, Joe may have been subject to hours of psychoanalysis, helping pioneer the field of contemporary psychology. In the 1930s these talking sessions turned into medical surgeries—my brother would have received electro-shock therapies, administered to his brain again and again to induce seizures, while his body stayed strapped to a hospital bed.

With the election of the first disabled president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and an exodus of able bodied men to Europe during World War II, Joe might have been accepted in the workforce for the first time in the 1940s. Combined with the return of many physically disabled veterans to the United States in the 1950s, Joe would have become more accepted by mainstream society.

In the 1960s and 70s, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, people with disabilities led marches, levied court cases, and advocated for their legal and social inclusion throughout. The Disability Rights Movement culminated in the Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1975. The act federally mandated the provision of meaningful, free public education for children with disabilities, and fueled the Independent Living Movement, who advocated for adult services post-high school graduation. Thus, forty years ago, Joe might have been able to attend Chapel Haven.

But even today, programs like Chapel Haven are not prevalent. According to a developmental disability newspaper, Disability Scoop, only 17 percent of young adults (age 21-25) on the autism spectrum live independently. About one third of adults in the same age group with other mental disabilities, like intellectual development disorder or Down Syndrome, live outside their parents’ homes. The 1980s conservative backlash on the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s relegated mental health care to state legislatures, where funds diminished dramatically. Chapel Haven is funded primarily through private tuition.

In the absence of affordable social programs, state and federal prisons increasingly house people with mental illnesses and disabilities. In 2005, the US Department of Justice reported that more than half of all people incarcerated in local, state, and federal prisons had mental health problems. Al Jazeera stated in 2014 that US prisons house 10 times the amount of people with mental illnesses than state hospitals. +++ ​ atherine Sullivan-DeCarlo, Vice President of Admissions and Marketing for Chapel C Haven, works to recruit families for its programs. According to DeCarlo, the most important factor for admission to Chapel Haven is family and participant motivation. As an adult program, she says, “no one is going to drag you out of bed.” DeCarlo also looks for whether or not the individual falls within the expertise of the organization—adults with social or developmental disorders—and tries to be as transparent as possible with parents about what Chapel Haven can and cannot offer their children. DeCarlo says, “what we don’t want to be is a disappointment to anyone. Because for parents of people with disabilities, there are a lot of disappointments.”

DeCarlo compares entry to Chapel Haven to the college application process. “There are a lot of programs, so it’s hard for parents to find the programs and know their quality.

We might refer them other places, because we want people to do as thorough a search as

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

they would for their college student.” Like college, Chapel Haven functions as a bridge from the structure of high school to independent navigation of the adult world. 85 percent of its residents do not return home after graduation.

Also like college, Chapel Haven is not free. My mom tells me, “I don't think it’s that difficult to get into the program because it’s very expensive. They take 15 people each year but Joe’s year there was only 10 or 12. It’s not like there is a waiting list, even though there are a lot of people who need this service.” She remarks, “It costs $60,000 a year.

That’s more expensive than college.”

“The program’s very expensive,” my mother repeats for the third time in our phone interview. “But, for us, there weren't a lot of options for Joe.” +++ As I drive to Dunkin' Donuts, Joe chatters away about his friends and the nicknames they’ve given each other. He tells me a story of a party he threw in his apartment, pausing several times to stop laughing long enough to finish his sentences. When we park, Joe looks both ways before exiting. He failed his “street safety” test the first time and now occasionally stops and lifts his head when we walk downtown together, saying “I’m supposed to look up!” ​In our interview, my mother describes in detail how Joe goes grocery shopping for himself. How he makes a list, finds the items in the store, scans them himself and pays with his allotted $45 budget. How he wheels his laundry to the laundromat, washes it, waits for it to dry, and wheels it back—actions both small and unimaginable for anyone in our family two years ago. For my mom, the best part about Chapel Haven is not the life-skills, or the job training, or the absence of a TV blaring in our family room while she cooks dinner. “My favorite part,” she says, “is all the texts I get that say, ‘today was awesome’ or ‘this trip was awesome.’ He gets there and he’s big man on campus, he’s gotta say hi to everybody. He just has friends there. He's happy. His happiness has gone from 0 to 1000.” ​I ask Joe what his favorite part of Chapel Haven has been. He tells me immediately, “getting yelled at,” referencing the parties and the nick-name stories. Then he gets serious: “No no. No, my friends and my roommate. They’re nice. We’re having a dinner party on Friday. We’re going to the Yale game on Saturday. I’m going to Dunkin' Donuts, too.”

SARA WINNICK B’15 prefers the term “adults with abilities.”

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FEATURES

□ 06

FLAVOR OF THE MONTH: ACTIVISM A conversation with Keith Cooper, founder of Providence Granola Project

by Erin West

In the corner of my closet, the Treasu(RED) Gap shirt that was so cute during seventh grade sits dejectedly alongside its friend, my string bracelet braided by Guatemalan children.

These products are just two among many that supposedly helped someone, somewhere, at some point. The concept of “consumer activism” is hardly foreign to many of us. Companies often market products as “doing good” by saying they will donate some of the proceeds to a cause, just like Gap gave about 20 percent of what I paid for my t-shirt to the Global Fund for AIDS. Sounds pretty great, right? If I’m already buying lots of things I don’t really need, why not have some of that money go to socially responsible projects? Bonus: I get to feel like my shopping is “doing good.” Some critics would actually say that this model harmfully reinforces an unequal dynamic between “haves” and “have-nots” (among other criticisms). Still, defenders might argue that selling products is an effective way to raise necessary funds they would otherwise not accumulate.

One such defender of these “do-good products” is Keith Cooper, founder of the Providence Granola Project. Cooper sells artisan granola to fund his social venture project. In 2008, Cooper wanted to address the needs of the oftenoverlooked refugee community in Providence. His Providence Granola Project helps refugees from countries around the world, including Liberia, Burundi, Eritrea, and Iraq, enter the job market by employing them to make and sell artisan granola. Refugees in the area acquire on-the-job skills training and language learning while making granola at Amos House in South Providence. The granola is sold around Providence in several stores and farmers’ markets, as well as online. Proceeds from granola sales go to funding PGP and paying their workers. PGP can thus help Providence refugees get the qualifications and connections to become employed.

When speaking with Cooper, I was impressed with his genuine desire not just to contribute what he can to a cause he cares deeply about, but to do so in a responsible way. It’s easy to slate the faceless CEO of Gap for selling activist products, but Cooper is of a different kind.

The College Hill Independent: There are a lot of underserved communities in the Providence area, why do refugees warrant our attention?

Keith Cooper: My background is in refugee resettlement. I started the project as a way to explore what it really took to get refugees into the job market. That was just my starting point, but I feel like what we are doing has a lot of applications to other vulnerable populations. Particularly immigrant communities where there is a lack of English and a lack of literacy. At least initially, I thought it was really beneficial to limit some of the variables when creating a model. If we come up with a model that we are sure works, then I would be more interested in expanding it to other populations.

The Indy: In addition to refugees or immigrants, I can think of other people in the Providence community who might have difficulty entering the job market for a variety of reasons, such as not being able to finish high school. Would you see your program expanding to encompass these groups?

KC: I am not interested in expanding in that direction right now. I feel like the thing we have to offer is that we understand significant cultural barriers. In a lot of places, our employees would try to go in and get a job and they would stare at the floor. I understand, and the people working with us understand that would be a sign of respect. A lot of employers do not have that kind of cultural literacy and, because of

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that, might not even consider someone a possible employee.

Because a lot of what we do is tackling cultural literacy problems, I am not really interested in that direction.

The Indy: When you were first thinking about how best to serve the refugee community in Providence, what made you decide to take the route of creating and selling a product?

KC: I feel like a product is a way to connect people. I haven’t wanted to work with a service because I feel like it doesn’t allow for all the opportunities of education. If we are producing 100,000 bars worth of granola and that’s being bought mostly locally, that’s a lot of specific granola bars getting out into people’s hands. The product can be an introduction to the social challenge we are working on. It can introduce people to refugees within the context of a product they really love and think is really well made. Already that starts to communicate something about who the refugees are and communicate some respect about them wisely in a way that can’t be done through a service.

The Indy: Why did you choose granola? It isn’t necessarily something intrinsic to the cultures of your employees. How did you pick it?

KC: I wanted something that was really marketable to wealthier neighborhoods and to people who might be more socially conscious. In choosing different flavors, we are able to adapt to different interests. I’ve wanted to incorporate more of our employees’ tastes and ingredients, and we have done that somewhat but it is harder to do than you would expect. We chose it partly because I felt comfortable with it, so it is partly my abilities and limitations. I also did not want to create a product that was unhealthy for you.

The Indy: You describe the granola as a bridge between the refugee community and the wealthier communities in Providence. I’m curious who your clientele base is and what you feel like the dynamic is between them and the refugees. Do you feel like your product successfully connects the two?

KC: It opens a door I think. I think there are a lot of people who never consider the fact that there are refugees in their town or city or are their neighbors. We hope that our website and our product and packaging are starting to tell the story of refugees. But I think it can be way more sophisticated.

At the same time I think probably more people have heard about refugees through our product than through lots of other attempts to educate people about vulnerable populations.

We can’t prove that, but I think the average person in Rhode Island tends to know more about refugees from us than other places.

The Indy: Do you feel that the idea of helping out is a major motivation for your customers?

KC: It’s a mix. I think some are learning, the product is educating them, and some are committed to our cause and buy the granola because of it. Buyers tend to buy it because they care about our mission. At farmers markets, people tend to buy it because they care about the granola. It’s the same with restaurants and grocery stores. They may sell the social mission a little bit, but really it is the product that matters to them. Bottom line, we want our organization to serve our employees, not for them to serve our organization. Even in our marketing. And it’s really tricky with a social venture.

You know, at some point you start needing the social venture

to start marketing your product, and there’s just a messiness there. I don’t even like the word refugee very much. I’m not sure refugees love the word refugee. It immediately puts them on the receiving line for everything.

The Indy: What have the outcomes been from your project?

What sort of jobs have the refugees you’ve been working with been able to find after PGP? KC: Our goal is entry-level, bottom-level, service type jobs.

Our goal is to get their foot in the door of the job market that would normally just push them out or leave them out for a couple years. I think something really terrible happens when a refugee who really wants to work is shut out of the job market because of language and cultural literacy barriers. I think that sets up a possible lifetime dependence on government programs and a hopelessness that I think is a travesty.

The reason a refugee came here is because they usually want a new life and they want to support their family and they are so determined. They will try anything and they make incredibly great employees. Once they have a job, some of them will stay in that entry-level job for the rest of their lives, but others are climbing and growing. This is a step of hope in the direction of self-sufficiency.

The Indy: Someone might approach this problem by teaching language skills and cultural knowledge in the classroom. In what way do you feel like your model is different or possibly offers more than classroom training?

KC: I have designed our model like this because I don’t think classroom training is very effective. Especially the employees who don’t speak English or don’t have literacy, they can find the classroom so alienating. Sit them in a classroom with four walls, add that level of abstraction to the learning process, and I’m just not sure people learn quickly. It is not that I am against education; my background is in adult education. I am totally for ESL, I just think when you keep adding in layers of abstraction between someone and what they want to learn it’s not a good education.

The Indy: You’ve worked with about 30 refugees in your first five years of operation. Where do you see PGP heading in the next five?

KC: I would love to expand into a larger production facility to become a more profitable business. If we could expand three or four times what we are now, we would be making better money and that would sustain our growth or allow for more growth. I would love to be in a multi-use facility that would allow us to make granola and also use the facility as business incubator. I’m not sure I would want to grow much more than that. I think some of that growth, if it works, would have to be Internet growth or sales growth and develop a distribution system up to Boston or New York. I think beyond that, I am more interested in replicating at the local level. Ideally starting a similar project in Boston or New York.

The Indy: In your opinion, what’s the best flavor of granola that you offer?

KC: [laughter] Never ask those questions. Of course I’ll tell you I like them all! I do have to say, I like our blueberry flavor, which is available only in the summer. I also like our banana bars that we just made.

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ACCIDENTAL GREATNESS How some of the world’s most famous discoveries started with mistakes

by Elena Suglia illustration by Athena Washburn

In 1879, chemist Constantin Fahlberg came home from a long day of experimenting with coal tar. Upon sitting down to eat, he noticed that his dinner rolls were sweeter than usual. When they tasted unspectacularly bland to his wife, he realized the taste must have been coming from his unwashed hands. As Fahlberg noted, “I had discovered some coal tar substance which out-sugared sugar.” Fahlberg, legend has it, jumped up from the dinner table and rushed back to his laboratory, where he tasted everything in sight until he identified the sugary culprit. Fahlberg had discovered saccharin, the popular artificial sweetener with a sweetening power 220 times that of cane sugar. The find would rocket him to fame and riches.

Serendipity has aided countless scientists in their search for answers, despite the dread scientists often attach to the unexpected. Without serendipity, we wouldn’t have the microwave, Velcro, or Teflon. It can be surprising how much of it exists in the judicious and deliberate world of science, a realm typically thought of as one of intense focus, planning, and intentional seeking.

In a year-long study of three different labs, University of Toronto researchers found that between 30 and 50 percent of all scientific discoveries are partially accidental. The authors of the study categorized findings as “unexpected” or “expected” based on scientists’ reports of their initial prognostications, and found that over half of the findings were unexpected.

Our world might be dramatically different if not for a certain small distraction or mislabeled test tube. If Alfred Noble had not cut his finger one day at work we would not have dynamite; if other accidents hadn’t befallen scientists’

actions and decisions, we would not have Saran Wrap, Silly Putty, implantable pacemakers, safety glass, or stainless steel.

But the stakes of these discoveries go beyond just the ease afforded by microwaves in heating up popcorn. Take, for example, a life-saving hormone: insulin. In 1889, German physicians Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski removed a healthy dog’s pancreas in the hopes that they would learn about the pancreas’s role in digestion. A few days later, the doctors noticed flies buzzing around the dog’s urine. Upon testing the urine to uncover the flies’ odd affinity for it, they found sugar in the pee. This realization might not be striking to the layperson, but von Mering and Minkowski pieced together the conclusion that the dog had become diabetic.

The doctors established the link between the pancreas and diabetes, paving the way for the invention of insulin by later scientists.

Royston Roberts notes in his book Serendipity, “The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole in a letter to his friend Sir Horace Mann in 1754.” Walpole wrote how impressed he was by a fairy tale in which “The Three Princes of Serendip ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.’”

However, science is not a fantasy in which serendipity graces a lucky few who inevitably go on to make groundbreaking discoveries or inventions. In an interview, Dunn said that because the “thunderbolt”-like stories receive the most media attention, “there are a lot of cultural misconceptions both inside and outside science about what discovery looks like or feels like.” Rather than playing out like “a fairytale,” Dunn said serendipitous discoveries can also be “fairly anticlimactic” in that they “transition from being sort of universally dismissed to being accepted.” Discovery in science is usually a slow, ongoing process that takes years. During this process, Dunn says, “wisdom can be crossed very quickly without most people realizing.” Only those who recognize serendipity when it strikes, however, are able to take advantage of this unexpected wisdom. As Louis Pasteur once said, “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Roberts searched for scientists who had a knack for accidental discoveries.

In studying scientists like Joseph Priestly, Louis Pasteur, and William Henry Perkin, he realized they shared two characteristics: curiosity and sagacity.

Curiosity is the driving force residing in born scientists. Sagacity, however, takes a bit more: in order to be considered sagacious one must be a true observer, and take note of unexpected phenomena rather than dismiss them as trivial.

Sagacity and serendipity, it seems, go hand in hand. Without sagacity, the serendipitous event Roy Heath observed in his laboratory went unexplored— when Heath stimulated the brains of schizophrenics and they reported feeling pleasure, he failed to inquire further and thus missed his chance to discover “pleasure brain circuits.” +++ While researching the flu in 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes. Interestingly, the area surrounding the mold contained no traces of the original flu bacteria, staphylococcus. At this point, protocol would dictate that

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he jot down a note documenting the observation, curse the rotten luck that allowed the slide to get contaminated, and throw it away. Instead, Fleming embraced the unexpected and let the mold grow. In doing so, he turned his luck from miserable to fantastic: the mold Fleming had discovered became the precursor to the super drug penicillin. Because Fleming had the wherewithal to recognize the potential medicinal uses of the unexpected mold, he ushered in a new era of antibiotics, and received the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his work.

As Hans Seyle, a pioneering Hungarian endocrinologist, stated to the Canadian Senate on Science Policy in 1964, “I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on the basis [of highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, ‘I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.’”

Herein lies the difficulty of trying to place a value on— and actively foster—serendipity in science. When a scientist wants to perform an experiment, he or she typically applies for funding. Much of this funding is available through federal grants composed of taxpayers’ dollars, which means that the scientist needs a good reason for spending money on any given project. Consequently, scientists must explicitly spell out how their research may impact society, the environment, etc. This obviously limits the amount of spontaneity that can take place. Every dollar has to be accounted for months in advance, and deviations are usually taken to mean that the original plan did not work. But Dunn says that this kind of “failure” is not necessarily a bad thing: “The reason that they would fail is often because answers would be different—very different than what we might expect.” As Dunn says, a lot of this has to do with “how we define success and failure.” When it comes down to it, all information is created equal. Unexpected answers are answers all the same, and as we have seen, the unexpected can lead to great discoveries too.

Is the scientific process, from grant writing to publication in a peer-reviewed journal, conducive to exploiting and maximizing the potential of serendipity? As federal budgets shrink, Dunn says, “There’s a real circling of the wagons around ideas that have a high chance of success.” Dunn continues, explaining that “there is more serendipity when you take bigger risks, so by definition in science, low risk means that you have a good idea of what outcome to expect.” Low risk, Dunn says, also “generally means low serendipity.” He says, “science is generally very conservative… there are places where that conservatism is very important such as in interpretation of data that we have at hand, but it also trickles through to other parts of the process like designing projects.” Herein lies the tragedy of conservatism in the scientific process: the lowered potential for chance discovery.

Is there a solution? European grant agencies tend to fund people while American agencies fund individual projects. Another line of thinking among American grant giving agencies states that the most fair and productive way to fund science is to give grants to people at random across the country. It is unclear whether any of these solutions is better than the current grant-giving system, or whether there is any solution at all. What is clear is that the death of randomness in the scientific process, a pinnacle towards which society seems to be continually striving, is paradoxically disadvantageous to science and humanity as a whole. Randomness, accidents, and the unexpected are the crux of what makes science an interesting, vibrant creative process. Sometimes, the most interesting and groundbreaking science comes about because of a cut on a finger or a bit of mold growing in a petri dish. Science as an enterprise today would do well to allow the spirit and creativity of the mad scientist to live on by embracing the unexpected. This collective path towards the truth on which we all tread is a meandering one, and in this case, following the straight and narrow will not get us there any faster.

ELENA SUGLIA B’15 can explain all this mold.

SCIENCE

□ 08

BLACK YANKEE: PAST AND PRESENT IN RHODE ISLAND

by Cherise Morris Illustration by Caroline Brewer Every time I talked with a family member or neighbor about my impending matriculation at Brown that summer, now nearly three years ago, they offered a similar caveat: “now you know…” They’d usually whisper this next part jokingly, but sometimes not so jokingly: “there aren’t many black folks up in Rhode Island.”

When my mom came to help me move in freshmen year, we toured downtown Providence, making the obligatory family Bed Bath & Beyond trip. The mosaic of faces, some distinct and others as nondescript as ever, changed dramatically as we scurried down College Hill to the mall. “Wow, I’ve seen so many more black people than I expected,” Mom joked as we waited at a crosswalk.

And here, I’ve learned to see in color, too. Because I can see no other way. +++ It is no secret that Brown University was built on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

I. You. We weren’t there when the first black slaves came to Narragansett Bay in the 17th century. When Rhode Island’s slave population rested at an amount almost twice that of its New England peers because of the state’s monopoly in the Triangular Trade. By the mid-18th century, Rhode Island had a higher proportion of slaves than any other colony in the North. Rhode Islanders sponsored nearly 1,000 voyages to and from the African coast, transporting an estimated 106,544 Africans to the New World for enslavement.

We weren’t there to witness colonial Rhode Islanders trade food for slaves, dealing black bodies as commodities measureable in sacks of flour and barrels of cider. One Newport sale receipt, unearthed by Ray Rickman of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society reads: Newport 12th November 1726 Then recd of Tho. Arnold Twenty One Barrels Of Cyder & Thirty Seven pounds Four Shillings In part of pay for Two Negroes Or to see Little Rhody become increasingly “protective” of its property, passing strict legislation in 1778 that forbid the removal of slaves from the state and enforcing these measures zealously throughout the following decades. Again exhibiting the harshest laws of any New England colony, a theft or runaway attempt by a black slaves in Rhode Island would result in 15 lashes or banishment from the colony. Slaves banished from RI would be sold to ruthless sugar cane plantations in the West Indies. The state would eventually pass a personal liberty law in 1848, forbidding involvement with any fugitive slave cases. A sign of progress? Maybe.

We didn’t witness that, at the same time, free black people were carving out communities for themselves. By 1820, Providence, and Newport, to a lesser degree, were becoming increasingly popular destinations for black settlement throughout New England, despite Rhode Island’s draconian slave regulations. Community was grounded in the formation of local, independent black churches, the first of which was the African Union Church, and the founding of the Meeting Street School in 1828, the first public school in Rhode Island.

We weren’t there to witness the cultivation of a strong black community and presence in what is now Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood as the area was settled in the early 19th century. Or the escalation and eventual eruption of racial tensions and rioting when cohorts of white Rhode Islanders pillaged black settlements in Snow Town in 1831 and its predecessor Hard Scramble in 1824. When a white man told a black to step off the sidewalk to let him pass. When the black man didn’t. And hundreds of white rioters burned the homes of 20 black families. Their actions, unopposed.

O Dear dear, read a broadside mocking the victims.

But we can see the displacement of black and brown families caused by the Lippitt Hill Redevelopment Project in Mount Hope. By the dawn of the 1960s, the Providence Redevelopment Agency had coercively relocated nearly 4,000 families in housing projects across the city, Williard Center One and Willard Center Two in South Providence/Point Street and Weboysett Hill downtown/East Side and Mount Hope on the East Side/West River in Fox Point.

Pushed out. black. place. meant. +++ At home, in Viriginia, Confederate flags blew proudly in the wind, legally abandoned symbols still deeply entrenched in cultural nostalgia. There was even one mounted outside our state house. The Dixie anthem rang sweetly over car horns and cell phone ringtones.

“In Dixie land where I was born” The flag’s iconic emboldened red and crossed blue ribbons engraved with white stars were usually flanked by guns and catchphrases hailing the “Rebel Yell” on countless t-shirts and hats at my school, in my local grocery store, on the front page of the local news. The regional Ku Klux Klan chapter would circulate pamphlets on a biannual basis, anonymously leaving the incendiary tracts in mailboxes and car hoods.

I was called the “N-word” for the first time in kindergarten; and before I promptly kicked that little boy’s backwards behind on the playground that afternoon and ended

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METRO

up siting alone in the principal’s office for the rest of the day, I stood in silence. Digesting. The connotations of my skin. I learned to see in color there, too, as I could see no other way.

But I was elated by the yearned-for northward migration that college—Brown— promised me. The idea that this liberal institution and racial cultural supremacy were mutually exclusive, but how naïve.

Almost immediately I found myself digesting those same connotations of that same skin over and over, just like before, in class after class, at party after party, in shops all over the East Side. When that Brown DPS officer stopped me before entering my freshman year dorm one Wednesday afternoon. “You’re not gonna piggy-back in here on me,” said the portly, uniformed white man.

“Do you even go here?” … “Show me your student ID,” he interrogated. I did, but that wasn’t good enough proof. So he closed the door and tested my ID to see if it would swipe into the building. It did. And he left without another word.

It would be impossible to offer a complete account of every racially charged moment I’ve had in the past three years, to prove every time I’ve assessed my skin in the context of others’ skin and felt…something…less than…

That other time I was standing outside of a house on Williams Street, waiting for a friend at 1 AM and that white cop drove up, slowed down as he passed me, and rolled down his window starting at me boldly with a glint in his eye that told me without any verbal detonations: you don’t belong here. Then— SKKKKKKKKKIRRT accelerated away, in an aggressive display of his power. He saw me see him see me see my blackness, read the superficial aspects of my identity, my skin as worthy of criminalization.

And that other time when I was smoking under the awning of a university building one rainy Friday afternoon, and the same cop who attempted to deny me entry into my dorm building biked up, “you need to put that out or move away from the building.”

“OK Sir.” He went inside.

I didn’t put the bogie out.

“I told you to put the cigarette out,” he returned moments later. “I could have you locked up for breaking a federal law.”

“But he’s smoking right next to the entrance of that other university building—” I pointed at an unknown white peer a few yards away, also smoking within 50 feet of a university building, also breaking a federal law.

“It’s a federal law.”

“Oh really?” We locked eyes, I put the cigarette out, he smirked and went back inside, I retrieved the wet cigarette, wrote a little note and jammed both of them in between the buildings front doors, hoping my buddy would see it when he exited: FUCK RACIST PIGS +++ We weren’t there, but here I see.

I see black faces, faces, black faces-Black-faced-portraits parading mediated conceptions of the convict, the criminal, the bad guy or the loud woman who will take yours because they are too lazy to go out and get their own. The Sentencing Project report says, that here, in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations the black incarceration rate was 1,838 per every 100,000 black residents, as compared with the white incarceration rate of 191 individuals per every 100,000 white residents last year.

I see black man after black man after brown man after black woman after brown woman in the ACI. Adult. Correctional. Institute. And the ACLU reports say Providence police pull black people over for traffic violations more frequently and are twice as likely to arrest blacks for marijuana possession. But what’re we going to do about that? There aren’t any laws on the books against driving while black. Instead, acknowledge their blackness, see it. Then wait for them to break the law, then give them a ticket, then catch them with drugs, then it’s all a matter of agency and we can’t argue with that, right?

I see black. black. black. black. black. kid in detention in Providence Public Schools because, well, they’re disruptive. The ACLU also reported that 36 of 38 Rhode Island school districts suspended black students at disproportionately higher rates between 2004 and 2012. Or at least that’s what they say. Or maybe it’s because the Southern Poverty Law Center rated PPS’ civil rights curriculum: F? F, meaning that the Rhode Island elementary and secondary curricular standards include none or less than 20 percent of the recommended content on US historical battles for equality.

I see black. No, not a monolith, but always treated as such. Pathologize their color because it’s easier to think that way.

When that middle school teacher whose class I volunteered in told me, “Congrats, they assigned you to my worst class.” And maybe it was just a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of students in that section, unlike the teacher’s other four classes, were black and brown, 90 percent of them on free and reduced lunch? But probably not.

I see white-male-politician-white-male-politician-white-male-politician-Michelle Obama-white-male-politician and think this can’t be what equality means?

Every time I go into a CVS on the East Side and there are no black haircare prod-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ucts, every time the cashier asks, “Is there something I can help you with,” as their gaze follows me around the store.

Keeps tracing my steps. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked walking through Kennedy Plaza. Because I would surely see other black faces among the crowd and that affirmation of my skin felt nice.

That tacit smile exchanged briefly with another brown body in passing. Have they, too, felt the uneasiness and distrust rise from the pit of their stomach, up and down their spine to tips of their fingers and toes as they passed a congregation of uniformed policemen? I don’t know them. But when I see them I see experiential knowledge; I see understanding; I see color that looks like mine and that’s reassuring. I see the possibilities that maybe once before, or even right at that moment, this person has felt the same way. This person has also seen and felt in color.

CHERISE MORRIS B’16 wasn’t there either.

NOVEMBER 14 2014

METRO

□ 10

RUNNING DOWN Sports, time zones, and globalization All major sports, at their core, are structured by time. Time structure differentiates an NBA game from pickup, performance from practice. Sports become official when they comply with the time structures imposed by their regulatory organizations, both national and international.

The times can be absolute: a basketball game lasts for four 12-minute quarters, a hockey match for three periods of 20. They can also be relative: a baseball game lasts for nine innings, a unit of time further broken down to outs, or even more finely into strikes. A soccer match, which lasts for two 45-minute halves, has time appended at the end of each to account for stoppages in play. In most sports, if no winner can be determined at the end of regulation time, more is added on. We go to overtime, extra innings, and penalty kicks. When the score is close and the clock is running down, managing time becomes the game itself. Managers, coaches, and players extract as much as they can from each second. Time, in sports, is wrung dry.

Managing time is both the central conceit of sport and the main tenet of globalization, figured always as a competition. This comes, in part, from the sticky and pervasive rhetoric of the “global stage”—an abstract space in which, once qualified, nations may enter and compete.

Globally networked capital has its own rhythms and flows, always trying to conquer, profit, and wring dry. “In the future,” a recent HSBC ad reads, “there will be no markets waiting to emerge.” In time, somebody will have won.

When coupled with globalization, time always comes tethered to space. Time, both in sports and global capital, has a locus. As sports travel from West to East and back again, struggles emerge over whose structures of time will shape the game. The structuring of time and the division of time zones, a project of industrial Europe, carries within it a logic of dominance over space. If time can be gridded and its space mapped, power comes from keeping the clocks.

+++ Through tension in time, sports broadcasts maintain viewership in an era where all else can be time-shifted. The live sports broadcast is one of the few televised events that, in 2014, refuses to meet you when you are. It’s not just that sports can be live but that, in order to sustain a market, they must be. Spectatorship hinges on “real-time.” Advertising space during sports broadcasts is more expensive because a commercial-enduring audience is all but guaranteed. A global network of information, the very network that in theory collapses distances and makes time irrelevant, actually guarantees the time-sensitivity of sport. Because the news of a goal or victory travels at fiber optic speed, the only way to remain in the game is by following it live.

In early October, the NBA announced a renewal of its media rights deal with Turner and Disney. The two major networks will pay the NBA $24 billion over the next nine years in exchange for exclusive national broadcasting rights for its games. It’s a 180 percent increase from the previous deal. Suddenly, $385 million for the Sacramento Kings seems like a goddamn bargain.

In a September interview with Bloomberg TV, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé thinks the “greatest deal in all of sports is the least expensive NBA franchise,” because even the league’s smallest-market team gets an equal share of any global prospects. “It’s my job,” joked Silver, “to demonstrate he’s right.”

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SPORTS

A New Yorker article from October 2013 estimates (via figures provided by the Chinese Basketball Association) that there are nearly 300 million Chinese people who play basketball The number, roughly equivalent to the entire American population, represents an entire market that NBA commissioner Adam Silver and many of the league’s owners are eager to cash in on. In the Bloomberg interview, Silver echoed Ranadivé: “A large part of the value in buying a smaller market team in the United States is the fact that you do have 1/30th of China, 1/30th of India, 1/30th of Africa, 1/30th of the entire world.” Silver slips into metonym, referring to a country or continent in place of its potential media rights money. The slip is telling: as an NBA owner, you can try to own a share in entire countries, both developed and developing.

The parallels between sports and time, time and money, money and globalization feel abstract until, suddenly, they are no longer. A flight through recent sales of NBA franchises makes the connections unavoidable: the Los Angeles Clippers to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer for $1.2 billion, the Sacramento Kings to real-time computing billionaire Vivek Ranadivé for $385 million. In a perfect neoliberal allegory, former US senator sold the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks to Wall Street investors Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry last year for $585 million. That the rich own sports teams is nothing new. But a lot has changed since Malcolm Gladwell argued, as recently as 2011, that buying a basketball franchise is a vanity purchase, like owning a Van Gogh.

As the global market for live basketball consumption grows, the prospect of simultaneous global broadcasting stages a struggle between time zones. The distance between sporting event and spectator can be vast, but the time-delay remains miniscule. An NBA game played at 7PM EST can be seen in London and Beijing at the same time it can be seen in New York, but it doesn’t change the fact that 7PM on America’s east coast is midnight in the United Kingdom and 8AM in China. “The biggest challenge [to growing the sport] is the timezone differences,” Silver told Bloomberg. “Once the audience becomes big enough,” he suggested, “maybe it’s not so crazy to ask a team once every two months to play a Saturday morning game.” This would present a radical shift in the practice of time-shifting: rather than fans across the globe waking up early to watch a game, American players would wake up early in order to be watched. +++ What then, of sports on the global stage? Events like the Olympics and the World Cup have become a way for countries to bid on opportunities to prove themselves capable of managing the world’s time. If the audience is truly global, someone somewhere is waking up in the middle of the night to watch. From the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where the Opening Ceremony featured performances synchronized so tightly that any slippage seemed impossible through the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where apartheid could be shuffled into the past, to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where the poor timing of a firework forming the Olympic rings triggered the declaration of the entire event as a “fail,” large global sporting events require nations to prove themselves able of keeping time. In Sochi this winter and in Brazil this summer, the world gossiped about whether or not these countries would be ready. Could they get it together in time?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE CLOCK

by Tristan Rodman illustration by Maya Sorabjee Each of the last three World Cups have featured, as a bridge between the host country and international advertising campaigns, an “official slogan.” It seems unsurprising that, in marketing a global sporting event that recurs once every four years and, in doing so, brings its participating countries to a near-standstill, some reference would be made to time. The 2006 Cup, in Germany, was “A time to make friends.” In 2010, South Africa offered a slogan of “Ke Nako,” which translates from Sesotho to English as “It’s time.” This past summer, in Brazil, the slogan was “All in one rhythm.” Brazil’s Sports Minister, Aldo Rebelo, said that the slogan was an invitation “to find and explore the new rhythm of Brazil: the rhythm of unity and diversity, the rhythm of innovation, the rhythm of nature, the rhythm of football and the rhythm of Brazilian culture.” Rhythm is time with a structure already built-in.

The use of “rhythm” here feels anticipatory, as if by positing a global rhythm through soccer, Brazil, too, might join the ring of FIFA-elite. “Unity,” “nature,” and “innovation” also serve to make invisible the perilous working conditions of the many migrant workers who built the stadiums and the mass evictions in Rio de Janiero’s favelas.

FIFA, as a governmental body, has also faced numerous charges of corruption. An investigation is underway on the 2018 and 2022 bids, awarded to Russia and Qatar respectively, though the findings have not been released to the public. If the 2022 Cup does remain in Qatar, whose summer temperatures average between 95 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit, some sort of time-shifting has been deemed necessary. Matches will either be played late at night, or during the winter months.

The bid reports submitted by each country to FIFA read as justifications for entry—an argument for how that country might comply with European viewership. A large part of the analysis offered in the bid report is the effect of the potential host country’s time zone on viewership for those in and around Greenwich Mean Time. There is still a center.

During the Cup, author Teju Cole conducted an experiment on Twitter from which a different picture emerged. He asked his followers to photograph their television screens during matches, and upload the photograph alongside the match time (i.e. 9th minute) and their location. The resulting collage, still viewable under #timeofthegame, documents an entire global network around the match. At timeofthegame.o-c-r.org, all of the photos have been stabilized with a screen in the center, lapsing through time from the first minute to the 120th. The time of the game is relative, not absolute. “We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other,” Cole wrote. “Then the game begins and we enter the same time: the time of the game.” Rather than forcing a global unity, the time of the game viewable through Teju Cole’s analysis offers a slightly different read. #timeofthegame is not rhythmic but polyrhythmic—a number of different tempos sounding at once, sometimes locking in, but sometimes not.

But despite the insistence of advertisements on ESPN, a sporting landscape where the West is not the center is an impending reality. Last month’s 2014 League of Legends championship, where (mainly Korean) teams competed at the computer game, was viewed by 20 million people and broadcast by ESPN in the middle of the East Coast night. The shock of Adam Silver’s speculation that NBA teams will play 10 AM games comes not, maybe, from the idea that the players will wake up to be watched, but from the prospect of American fans having to wake up to watch American sports. Who is ringing the alarm?

TRISTAN RODMAN B’15 is a spatiotemporal mess.

+++ The fantasy of globally televised sport is that it collapses distances and differences. During this past summer’s NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs, the NBA ran a commercial that featured LeBron James on television screens across the globe. The camera cuts rapidly between clocks hanging on the wall and TV sets sitting on their stands. With each tick of the clock, the language of the commentators shifts. We hear Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. Then LeBron dunks the basketball, and the differences collapse.

Every broadcaster yells in unison: “James!” The commercial airs in LeBron James Standard Time. The fantasy that sports can collapse differences across time remains centered around a world dependent on Western exports.

ESPN ran a nearly identical ad during the World Cup, a montage of people watching matches in Brazil, England, Ghana, Spain, Russia, Iran, Japan, the US, Mexico, and Chile.

“Every four years,” the ad concludes, “the world has one time zone.” While the ad cuts across and between different nations and cultures, power is still fixed in place: in the Ghana of the advertisement, a man pedals on a stationary bike to power the match on TV. This is not one rhythm.

NOVEMBER 14 2014

SPORTS

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INTIMATE STRANGERS

by Connor McGuigan

Growing up on Internet forums

(and is rather excruciating to look back on). I never fully assimilated into the community there—mostly just projected my adolescent transitions to a halfinterested audience. It was a venue to explore new identities with no repercussions.

This is the most famous post in the history of Internet forums.

On July 14 2004, a user registered as “lonely” posted it to the forums of moviecodec.com. The first reply came six days later.

“Why are you lonely? Are you on your own?” Fairylady asked.

Three days after, the third reply: “Dude, I typed in ‘I am lonely in Google, and your post was the very first response.”

The replies filtered in rapidly as people disclosed they had turned to a Google search to subdue their loneliness. The thread became a support group for all who arrived looking for companionship. After nearly 1,500 replies, Wired referred to the post as the “the web’s top hangout for lonely folk.” Today, the thread has 44,000 replies and is still posted in nearly every day.

Moviecodec.com is a site ostensibly devoted to the specifics of ripping video files, a seemingly unlikely place for such a gathering. But Internet forums are not just a place for Q&As or subculture hangouts. They often deviate far from their parent site’s original focus and become vibrant communities defined by individuals—online platforms to share miscellaneous thoughts with intimate strangers. +++ I first registered a forum in 2005. The site was Halo2Forum. com, an online social hub dedicated to an Xbox game. That moment was my first glimpse of the malleability of identity on the Internet. I chose the username “McGiggles.”

I was one of many adolescents in that era that to explore an increasingly specialized Internet. The web seemed limitless, but its uses were far less calcified than they are today. It was more common to seek out communities distinct from one’s personal life as a primary online social outlet. And even on Myspace, the most ubiquitous social network of the time, usernames and other profile customizations offered room for online personas less tethered to the social structures of real life.

Internet forums are vestiges of “Web 1.0”—they predate broadband, social networking and sophisticated data analytics.

The Halo2Forum followed the traditional blueprint established by the “online bulletin boards” of the ‘90s. The site was host to a number of sub-forums, each with its own guiding topic. Most were related to Halo (Halo Discussion, Halo Videos), and a few were outlets for those tired of talking about Halo (“Complete Off-topic”). Inside these sub-forums, users would post “threads” with a specific topic or question relating to the sub-forum’s original topic.

The site also adhered to the aesthetic of its predecessors. Most forums are built using one of a few user-friendly software packages. A site’s proprietor (known as the “Admin”) can differentiate their forum by outfitting it with a “skin,” a unique color and graphic scheme. Halo2Forum’s skin was orange, green and grey, and plastered with poorly-Photoshopped graphics depicting heroic acts by the game’s main character.

User personalization also contributed to the slapdash look of the forum. Members could design their own avatars (analogous to a profile picture) and include graphics or text in “signatures” that would show up after each of their posts.

Along with avatars and signatures, there’s one other technique for standing out in a forum: post a lot. A user’s post count, displayed prominently beneath their avatar, constituted their social clout. I picked up my posting when I realized this, but it quickly became apparent to people that I was 12 years old.

I posted over 1,000 times on Halo2Forum.com. Everything I wrote on that website remains a Google search away

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TECHNOLOGY

+++ I remember the exact computer I sat at the day I met Adam Cooley. I was in my high school’s library during lunch period, browsing through sonicyouth.com, listening to the band’s 1986 record Evol on borrowed headphones. I was 15, a few years removed from my last forum post or Halo game, but with new obsessions taking me to new corners of the Internet, I had arrived at a forum dedicated to my favorite band.

Sonic Youth Gossip had all the trappings familiar from my Halo forum days—subforums, avatars, signatures—yet everything seemed more refined and curated. The skin was a tasteful gradient of blues, and the avatars were untouched by MS Paint. My first post included a question to the forum’s members: “anyone have any solid weirder or more underground music to recommend me?”

My first reply was from a user named “atsonicpark.”

Below his name was the highest post-count I had ever seen in my years trawling forums—around 20,000. “Sure man,” he wrote back, “check out the complete recorded works of...” and proceeded to list 411 bands. The lists included names like Virgin Mega Whore, Necronomitron, and the Beatles.

I’m not sure I understood back then that Adam was making fun of me. I certainly should have known better than to ask a group of Sonic Youth superfans for “underground” music suggestions. Thankfully, most other replies were cordial and I was officially christened as a member of SYG. The site was similar to Halo2Forum in the way that all large message boards are similar—few talked about what they had originally joined to discuss. The “Non-Sonic Sounds” and Off-topic boards were constantly alight with activity; the Sonic Youth-related sections were slow and predictable. Many regulars never visited these sections and claimed to be “over” the band all together.

I was used to forums feeling like ultra-familiar chat rooms.

Reading through posts during my first days on Sonic Youth Gossip, I felt like a voyeur poring over private correspondences between best friends. The site’s regulars frequently swapped intimate stories and sought advice from each other in the non-music related sections. Though I didn’t post that frequently, I started to pick up on the first names and life stories of many of the usual posters. “Diesel” was a heavy-drinking British guy named Craig with a home recording project and a drinking problem. "HaydenAsche" was working on his thesis and had a prescription drug habit. These users knew nothing about me. In fact, I could have been anyone with an Internet connection.

teenage years. An association developed between some of the most important things in my life and a guy in Indiana who didn’t know I existed.

I learned a great deal about the life of Adam Cooley while parsing through "atsonicpark"’s posts for music recommendations. He devoted most of his energy to making experimental music and films, and was known for his prolific output in some circles. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth once reviewed a cassette by one of his bands. “These guys revel in deep-well sonar-death where the skies threaten to break in a rain of shrieking ghoul shred,” he wrote. To the members of SYG, Adam may as well have been lauded by the President.

Like those of many SYG members, Adam’s posts often chronicled personal issues in great detail. I read rants about his upheavals in his life, his relationship with his mother, his drug problem, his girlfriend—and I found myself genuinely interested.

I slowly constructed for "atsonicpark" something close to a full-fledged identity. A projection, with color and character entirely gleaned from the Internet. My activity on SYG slowed and images of other members eventually faded. The opaquely rendered Adam Cooley stuck with me, living within the music I cared about the most.

Aside from a few Facebook messages, I never reached out to him personally. I knew him well enough to know he probably wouldn’t like me very much. +++ Adam Cooley died in his sleep in Columbus, Indiana last February. He was 27 years old and choked after vomiting up pills he had been prescribed. He was buried in jeans, a red flannel and a Sonic the Hedgehog t-shirt.

A short obituary was published in The Columbus Republic the week he died. Adam was a loving son, a good friend and a long-time Wal-Mart employee, it said. At the service, one of his friends mentioned that Adam would be survived by a number of “online friends” that cared deeply about him.

A thread titled “Goodnight, Sweet Prince,” became the venue for tributes and eulogies. Many who posted knew "atsonicpark" far more intimately than I did. One user named Derek recalled his near-daily correspondence with Adam.

They had never seen each other in person, but had arranged plans for a meet-up. “He was my best friend,” Derek wrote.

Others seemed more reticent to unabashedly eulogize someone they had never met. Often, remembrances were tempered with sympathy for family and friends who “actually knew him.” These were some of the first times I saw the distinction between the digital and “actual” realm surface in forum discourse. +++

Adam was among the forum’s most candid.

Scrolling through "atsonicpark"’s post history became a typical Internet diversion of mine. I quickly learned part of the reason he posted so often—he was practically teeming with music. He posted over 100 threads detailing albums he considered “classic,” and rounded out every year with a giant list of albums I had never heard of. As I spent more time on SYG, the majority of new music I listened to came from wading through his old posts. And if I found a band without his guidance, I would search the forum to see what "atsonicpark" thought of them. With none of the institutional validation of a music critic, Adam became the primary tastemaker in my life.

The music he lauded was unbelievable, and of a seemingly endless supply.

He had an insatiable taste for pop melodies shrouded in and fractured by dissonance. The best of the bands he wrote about—Polvo, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Number Girl—were fundamental to my

I learned of Adam’s death after entering “atsonicpark” into the Sonic Youth Gossip search box earlier this month. It had been a while since I checked up on him.

The next day, someone mentioned after class that I seemed despondent. An “old friend” of mine died, I told her.

Adam had been dead for 9 months.

I know enough about Adam to understand what vanished from the world when he died. Yet, everything I know is highly accessible public information. I felt shades of genuine grief, but they were grounded in the solipsistic exercise of mourning a projection.

I often wish that I chose a less public venue to share my musings as I grew up. But perhaps forums, to their most dedicated users, offer a primitive private space on the Internet.

The members of Sonic Youth Gossip who knew Adam best commiserated like a group of estranged friends revisiting an old hideaway. “Death brings old friends together. Yall mean more to me than most ppl i physically know,” "SONIC GAIL" wrote.

In their worlds, online and off, I don’t exist.

CONNOR MCGUIGAN B’15 promises he exists.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE BUK OF CHO’BE

by Janey, Pull My Teeth

NOVEMBER 14 2014

EPHEMERA

□ 14

A HOUSE DIVIDED

It's a leisurely 20-minute walk—25 if there's traffic at the Ledra Street checkpoint—between the two Museums of National Struggle in Nicosia, the divided capital of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. They are both bright and immaculately kept. On a weekday morning, chances are they will be full of schoolchildren on field trips.

One museum is in the southern Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus. The other museum is in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a pseudo-state not recognized by any nation except Turkey. Both proudly and vehemently make the case for the island’s national character. Of course, they differ as to just what that national character is.

Cyprus “became Greek during the 14th century BC when the Myceneans settled there,” reads a wall text in the foyer of the Greek Cypriot Museiou Ethniki Agona. “Since then the monuments, language, customs and traditions of the Cypriot people have all been Greek. None of the foreign rulers managed to change the national character of the Cypriot people."

A similar wall text hangs in the foyer of the Turkish Cypriot Milli Mucadele Muzesi.

Even during the “painful days of the struggle given by the Turkish Cypriots to keep the enemy [Greek Cypriots] off its precious soil,” the text claims, “the Turkish Cypriot people…did not lose their hope despite the migrations, mass murders, and economic and political pressure imposed on them by the Greeks."

These public proclamations aren’t the only things that correspond: exhibits, too, maintain an institutional opposition. In the Greek Cypriot museum, photographs of deceased fighters are used to spell out the acronym EOKA, the name of the militant organization that shook off British rule in the 1950s and later gave rise to an anti-Turkish Cypriot terrorist group. In the Turkish Cypriot museum, photographs of deceased fighters are used to spell out the acronym TMT, the name of the militant group that thwarted Greek Cypriot attacks on Turkish enclaves in the 1960s.

More than a quaint accident of history, the mirror-image museums were each

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ARTS

designed with mathematical ethno-national intent. They aim to promote specific visions of what it means to be Cypriot—either Greek or Turkish, with no gray area in between.

These museums are didactic mouthpieces for political bodies with vested interests in the way their history is told. Turkish Cypriot authorities tell a story of how ignominious persecution in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s ended when Turkish troops arrived as a part of the “peace operation” of 1974. Greek Cypriot authorities preach 3,500 years of glorious Hellenism and a successful war for independence from the British, marred by the Turkish “invasion” in 1974. These official narratives have bolstered the competing claims of Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders for land and political recognition on the small island.

Museums are only part of the mechanism for what sociologist Henri Lefebvre described as a process of “conceiving the city,” or building a state-sanctioned narrative around public space. Street names, monuments, statues, even municipality logos and building codes all physically manifest certain readings of history and the state’s political agenda, or in this case, two different agendas. Cities tell stories to the people who live in and pass through them; states write the words of those stories.

The old city of Nicosia covers barely a square mile, yet is laden with dissonant ethnonationalist symbols in ways that few other places are. Perhaps because it is the seat of government for two nations at odds or because it was the site of violence, even seemingly mundane features of the urban landscape have accrued poignant political significance for Greek and Turkish Cypriots alike. Street names change from north to south, so that Istanbul Road becomes Athena Avenue. The sites of the most ferocious mid-century bloodshed are memorialized with plaques. Nationalist graffiti is inscribed on the walls of the UN-patrolled demilitarized Buffer Zone that cuts across the city. Even the mere presence of the UN drives home the point that the narrative of ethnic conflict predominates in official stories of the city. Unique among conflict zones, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus’s (UNFICYP) deployment is funded by the Republic of Cyprus.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Katherine Long illustration by Ben Ross

But even as the two governments—as well as the UN, and myriad development organizations—attempt to force the old city of Nicosia into neatly defined national archetypes, those molds are contested by the residents of the city, by outsiders, by forces of globalization. The official narratives of national struggle, of demonization of the other, are not what’s under fire: rather; it’s the centrality of the conflict itself as the city’s defining characteristic some Cypriots find difficult to swallow.

And just as photographs construct the centrality of conflict in the Museums of National Struggle, two photographers—or rather, one photographer and one group of photographers—are now using them to help tear that construction apart. +++ The Buffer Zone runs the width of Cyprus, demarcated by the ceasefire lines between Greek and Turkish Cypriot forces. It’s often called the Dead Zone, and for the thousands of Cypriots who abandoned their homes in the Buffer Zone during the 1960’s and 70’s, their decaying houses bear testament. For some, the moniker is even more literal: Turkish forces that have established a fortified front line on the northern edge of the zone have been known to shoot trespassers.

For many Cypriots, nothing exists in this strip of land but trauma. It's a blank spot on the map. The Dead Zone and the Buffer Zone are only two names for the meandering gash dividing the island: The Line of Shame. The Green Line. The Attila Line. The names evoke feelings of and pain associated with the inter-communal strife of the 1950s and ’60s.

It's easy to imagine the Buffer Zone as a barren wasteland, snaking raggedly across the island. In some places, it's impossible to tell where the Republic of Cyprus ends and the Buffer Zone begins—until a UN patrol rolls up asking to see a permit for entry.

Freelance photographer Barbara Laborde's work tells the story of a Buffer Zone far from dead. Laborde spent over a year traveling the 100-plus-mile length of the Buffer Zone, documenting what she found. Her Buffer Zone is teeming with life: villages, farms, daycare centers, wildlife, even a radio station broadcasting from within the zone.

But even the residents have "no conception of the Buffer Zone as a physical space," according to Laborde. The Cypriots who live in Pyla, Athienou, Troulloi are aware of the reality of their village, and know it hypothetically exists in the Buffer Zone. "But when it came to making the connection...” Laborde says, "sometimes it took hours for them to see that."

Something more subversive also exists in the stories she tells with her camera and anecdotes accompanying them: a Buffer Zone whose assumed reality is unmade by the people within it. Not consciously, not maliciously, but simply by living normal, ingenious lives motivated by necessity and animated by persistence.

The Cypriots of the Buffer Zone live in what is supposed to be ground zero of a decades-long conflict, yet they refuse to let those circumstances dictate their everyday. Sociologist Asef Bayat characterizes such non-ideological “collective actions of non-collective actors…to manage, resist, and subvert domination” as “nonmovements,” or “unnoticed social practices that may in fact be the harbinger of significant cultural change.” In this case, the domination is of public space; in the Buffer Zone, the two states, the UN, and international actors seek to relegate ordinary Cypriots to passive spectators in their own land. Yet by practicing what Bayat would call “the art of presence,” or simply taking up publicly proscribed space, some Cypriots contest the Buffer Zone’s official narrative.

Laborde’s photographs tell stories like that of Haydar, the goat farmer whose herds obey no man-made boundaries. He lives in Pergamos, a municipality split in four between the Turkish militarized zone, the Buffer Zone, north Cyprus, and a British sovereign base area; he compares the regimes to a “theater.” Haydar refuses to adhere to the UN’s 6 PM curfew for entry into the Buffer Zone if one of his animals is giving birth in the middle of the night: “To stick to those civil servants’ timetable with animals was impossible.”

The UN’s legitimacy as guardian of the Buffer Zone is based completely on the mythos of a divided space. UNFICYP patrols are not armed. They possess no authority to make arrests. And the people who live in and around the Buffer Zone largely understand that the emperor has no clothes. Laborde narrates one incident in which a UN patrol stops an unpermitted vehicle; its driver first attempts to cajole the patrol into letting him pass—“but you know me, you know it’s shorter for me to get home this way, it’s raining outside, I’ll only be here five minutes”—before just speeding away. The UN patrol doesn’t pursue the trespasser: they’re not allowed to break the speed limit.

The Buffer Zone as an entity can be understood as a fantasy – a constructed space, reified by the UN’s permits regime, by the leaders of the two communities, by international acceptance of its boundaries.

The only reason the fantasy of the Buffer Zone has persisted so long is because it is supported by the primacy of the us-versus-them mindset promulgated by leaders in the two communities. So long as the Buffer Zone is viewed as a space protecting “us from them” – from the Greek Cypriots who persecuted us; from the Turkish troops who invaded us – another very real layer of the space, the layer with inhabitants and commerce and Cypriot coffee, is consumed by its constructed symbolism.

Laborde’s work unwinds that fantasy in two ways. First, by proving there is nothing to fear. Her photos depict the UN detachments not only as toothless, but also as men and women just like the Cypriots themselves: they drink mate on patrol and listen to samba.

Second, by highlighting the work of Cypriots who, knowingly or unknowingly, rip holes in the fabric of the collective myth of the Buffer Zone as a dead place, out of time, governed by unintelligible rules and irrational foreigners. +++

of women in little clothing either." Nicosia, they thought, clearly has a public relations problem.

All five had deep ties to the old city. Tringides says he used to walk its streets as a teenager, looking for deserted corners where he could find a quiet place for a private conversation with friends. This was back when the city was still largely empty, before the arrival of Starbucks and McDonald’s, before USAID started pumping funds into master plans to rejuvenate the historic core. And while he doesn’t live in the old city, he still feels compelled to try to preserve some of its shell-shocked heritage for future generations before it disappears in a cavalcade of commercial storefronts and café tables.

So he and his friends started taking photos of what they found in the city’s deserted houses and vacant lots. Detritus from the exodus of the ’60s and ’70s, newspapers, school workbooks, toys, abandoned cars, outdated carpentry tools. They photograph squatters’ beds and empty buildings used as trash heaps and storage space.

Their photographs memorialize the city’s turbulent past. Even more, they memorialize a city outside the narrative inhabited by people who think about the conflict but not only about the conflict. These people are motivated primarily by necessity: by finding a place to sleep for the night, a place to shoot up in peace, a place to plant a few extra vegetables, a place to take a quick piss or down a few beers with friends.

Their photographs are reminders, too, that similar people lived in 1974. These are people outside top-down narratives of the city. They are the overlooked: children, workmen, mothers, immigrants. They left behind their most prized possessions to be looted and defaced, but also to serve as an inadvertent testament to their sheer normalcy.

ONR’s work quickly gained wide acclaim. Two and a half years ago, they launched a Facebook page to catalogue and share their vast photo collection. “On Friday we made the Facebook page, on Monday we were in the newspaper,” according to Tringides. ONR began to host photography and urban exploration workshops in the USAID-funded Home for Cooperation, a community center and cafe in the Buffer Zone. They operate on a simple principle: that a city belongs not just to its residents, but to anyone who feels a connection to it.

Their most recent project builds on this idea. In October, ONR launched a photography competition to create a new series of souvenirs based off crowd-sourced photographs of the old city. The competition is open to anyone—Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots, tourists, expats, people who are black, white, and green. Anyone, Tringides argues, should have the right not just to take possession of a city by capturing it in photographs and crawling into its empty spaces but actually to symbolize the city, to remake its public narrative. The souvenirs will be sold at the Home for Cooperation, which also contributed seed money for the project.

“The tactile value” of postcards and other souvenirs are huge, Tringides says, especially in our screen-obsessed world. They’re ambassadors of a city to the world beyond.

They help write a city’s story, or retell memories of a visit long past. Tringides hopes ONR’s souvenirs will present a new face of Nicosia: one that’s neither consumed by ethnic conflict nor subsumed by tourist-friendly commercialization. A face described by ordinary people who just love the city. +++ Barbara Laborde rejects the notion that the Greek-Turkish Cypriot tension has morphed into a “comfortable” conflict. It’s a term used by some academics, politicians, and diplomats to describe the current state of affairs in Cyprus: a tension that can pass as peace.

They argue that pursuing an island-wide settlement might result in more negative than positive outcomes; memories, they say, have become dulled and romanticized.

That interpretation, Laborde says, ignores the ever-present pain of Cypriots touched by the conflict—and every Cypriot has been touched by the conflict. But even if the conflict isn’t comfortable, it’s by no means the only thing going on in Cyprus.

That’s clearly not the case. The centrality of the conflict in everyday life as a narrative is challenged by the everyday actions of ordinary Cypriots, people creating tiny bubbles of social space outside the space of the conflict. People picking at the threads of state narratives of conflict.

The work of Laborde, of Tringides and the rest of ONR, is a window into the reality of this conflict: a view that seems, in some ways, to contest the rampant politicization of even mundane elements of the urban landscape.

Sociologist Asef Bayat argues that “nonmovements” of ordinary people living apolitical lives contrary to the dictates of the state can “trigger much social change.” But it’s unclear if the work of ONR, and the actions of Cypriots captured by Laborde, make up a “nonmovement,” or how much social change they’re triggering. The “Cyprus Problem,” as it’s called on the island, seems stagnant. Settlement negotiations between the two sides are as contentious and rhetorically barbed as ever; surveys show that ordinary Cypriots are less inclined now to trust Cypriots from the other ethnic group than they were in 1974.

Turkish Cypriot “Prime Minister” Dervis Eroglu recently toured villages in the north to remind their residents that his administration is the only thing protecting them from their vicious neighbors to the south. “Greek Cypriots want your land,” he told them.

Memories here, like everywhere, are tied to land. Tied to place—places of violence, places of displacement, places of loss. Some Cypriots are arguing, quietly but effectively, that doesn’t mean those places have to represent spaces of conflict.

Small pockets of social change clearly do exist. But their message isn’t filtering upward.

KATHERINE LONG ’15.5 writes in the Buffer Zone.

The five photographers-cum-urban-explorers of Old Nicosia Revealed (ONR) hated the postcards of Nicosia sold in schlock shops on Ledra Street. "They're all sandy women in very little clothing, and beaches," says Orestis Tringides, an ONR member. "We're in the middle of the island—we don't have any beaches, and we don't have a whole lot

NOVEMBER 14 2014

ARTS

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MINOR

by Mary Frances Gallagher illustration by Cheyenne Morris 'prä-blm purse-laden arm grabs rough pulls back sharply fear rush of regret and a fast retreat questions of bruises he spits into the air petulant child pushing his mother’s knee 'i-(,)shü iris spies a groan of socks on parquet floor shudder at the shout your son hush papers rustle whispers grow louder to shred silence käm-pluh-'kā-shun ringing calls to clean up a house no one’s fault a coincidence purely luck and lack cannot blame his doctor calls to kitsch sterility covers a cotton blanket cleans walls with clinical precision

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LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

list 11/14 Trunk, Milkbread & Cocek! Brass Band AS220, 115 Empire // 9pm // $7

Psycho-pop, Funk/Hip-Hop, and Balkan/Serbian klezmer brass.

11/16 SerLieve City Hall, 25 Dorrance St // 8:30 - 5 pm // free

Second to last day to see Rebecca Flores’ painting show, an exploration of Flores’ therapeutic process of art making, which she formulated after her daughter was killed.

“SerLieve stresses the willingness to exist with spiritual confidence, trust, vitality, and accept experiences meant for discovering ourselves.”

Itchy Fish The Met, 1005 Main St // 8:30 pm // $10

Pearl jam cover band.

Rock at the Rock 10 Prospect St // 7:30 -10 pm // free

Rock out at the Rock with rock band Diamond Doves.

Food. Probably lots of Josiah Carberry jokes. Library closes at 5 for homework-doers.

Art and Activism with the Beehive Collective List 120, 64 College St // 7 - 9 pm // free

Beehive Collective artists will present the story and art from one of their graphics, “Mesoamerica Resiste” and talk about their approach to art as a form of activism. Discussion and participatory art-making to follow.

Snacks!

11/17 Poets and Writers 186 Carpenter St // 8 pm // $5-7

11/15 Bob Dylan PPAC, 220 Weybosset St // 8 pm // $53 - $128

Bob Dylan!

Two quiet bands and four poets. All really great. Go early to see video and text exhibition: “Come as you are.”

listtheindy@gmail.com

this weeks in listery: “The Terminator” becomes “The Governator” of California on 11/17/2003

11/18 Regulating Marijuana in Rhode Island List 120, 64 College St // 6:30 - 8:30 // free Community discussion sponsored by Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. What would it look like for Rhode Island to legalize and regulate marijuana? Public health experts, state legislators and social justice advocates will answer all the questions you have about marijuana regulation.

Did you know voters in DC, Alaska and Oregon voted to legalize weed last week? Probably you already knew that.

11/19 SHE: Picturing Women at the turn of the 21st-century, Bell Gallery, 64 College St ///Free Women women women women women. 1989 – 2013.

Up until December 21.

Artist talk by one of the featured painters, Glenn Brown, in the List auditorium at 5:30 pm.

11/20 Free Speech Thursdays: Poetry Slam AS220, 115 Empire // 811:30 pm // $4

Youth poetry slam and feature performance by visiting poet Carrie Rudzinksi, followed by all ages open mic.