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rick salamé & alex sammon

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Break the Bank

emma wohl & anna rotman

Look Who’s Talking simon engler

Shots, Shots 7 Shots, alix taylor

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Week in Review

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FEATURES

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NEWS

15 Sorrowing robert sandler

ARTS FROM THE EDITORS

Pronounced Bahl-lay 8 It’s robert sandler

Once I read a story set in the Ming Dynasty. The story was about a young boy. He lived in the capital city. The city was big, and there were many buildings. When it rained, you could walk from one end of the city to the other under the eaves. When it rained, you could walk from one end of the city to the other without getting wet. It was raining, so the boy did that.

More recently I dreamt about a grassy hill sloping into the ocean. The hill was green and the water was blue and plain. A long plain leading to the end of a video game rendering. On the hill there were doorways and arches. There was nothing in the sky. The grass was thick around the stone blocks.

Other things are real but also strange. For example: last week thousands of pigs were discovered floating dead in a river. The pigs had been dumped because they were diseased. Now that they were floating, no one could tell the difference. If you float a dead pig in a river, it’ll turn puffy and gray, no matter what. But pigs don’t belong in rivers, so men removed them with poles. The poles were long and thick and had prongs at the end. They looked like giant forks.

The men who used the poles to remove the pig bodies wore orange vests for safety.

Above them, the sky was gray. There was nothing in it. — SPE

Hair, Don’t Care 9 No megan hauptman

SPORTS Madness 11 March ?¿?¿?¿?¿ Who’s Talking Now 5 Look tristan rodman

SCIENCE 13

EPHEMERA

Science Fictions john aurelio

INTERVIEWS 14

Chris Gethard emma miller

LITERARY 16

KEEP CLOSE College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

theindy@gmail.com twitter: @maudelajoie /// theindy.org ///

Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress. Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

Alessandro De Francesco belle cushing

Cats 17 House maggie millner

X-PAGE 18 lizzie davis

WEEK

ON THE

BORDER

by Rick Salamé and Alex Sammon Illustration by Benson Tucker

BUTTERFLY KISS(INGER)

LUCHA EN AMERICA

They have no visas and don’t pay customs. This winter there were some 60 million of them: Monarch butterflies, flying south into Mexico for some fun in the sun. They’re perhaps the only bordercrossing demographic to see a drop in numbers over the past couple decades. A March 14 statement by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) confirmed that this winter’s migration was 59% smaller than last year’s and the smallest in 20 years. No one taught these butterflies political geography, so the main reason for the drop in Mexico’s winter population lies outside its borders.

According to Dr. Chip Taylor of the University of Kansas, American farmers’ increased use of the herbicide glyphosate has dramatically reduced the prevalence of milkweed, the monarchs’ dietary staple, in their Midwestern summer habitat. The result is a dramatic decrease in the butterfly population, which threatens ecosystems across the continent, as well as Mexico’s ecotourism industry. Plus, searching the sky for a massive swarm of orange butterflies is just about the only thing that could make the four-hour wait at San Ysidro Border Inspection Station bearable.

Mexico has done its best to protect the itinerant butterflies; the government launched a highly successful anti-logging campaign in 2003 to protect the monarchs’ winter habitat. The campaign coupled police patrols with programs intended to involve rural residents in the ecotourism industry. But alas, Mother Nature hath made the butterflies migratory, meaning that Mexico can’t do much about the problem without the cooperation of the United States in restocking the Midwest with milkweed. “The conservation of monarch butterflies is a responsibility shared by Mexico, the US and Canada,” said Omar Vidal, director of World Wildlife Fund-Mexico, in the March 14 statement. “Mexico is doing its part. It is necessary that the US and Canada also do their part and protect the habitat of the monarch in their countries.” Mr. Vidal underestimates the extent of American apathy when it comes to butterflies.

The United States is more than happy to cooperate with the Mexican government in managing the flow of people and drugs across the border, but butterflies are just not on the political agenda.

The fact remains, however, that the border between Mexico and the US is wide open for all sorts of crossings. Maybe it’s time for the two governments to start talking more often, before the little orange lepidoptera fall through the diplomatic cracks, somewhere near El Paso. —RS

Lucha Libre is huge in Mexico. And it’s about to blow up in the States.

This week marked the signing of a massive promotional deal between the league of masked Mexican wrestlers and American investment group FactoryMade Ventures. FactoryMade intends to integrate Lucha Libre into the American sports and entertainment world, with a series of live events and pay-per-view television displays.

Lucha Libre is Mexico’s second most watched sport after soccer, with 1,000 live events annually, five hours of television programming per week, and millions of tickets sold. That’s not to mention the television viewership of over 52 million that tunes in to see a world of wrestling in which weight class is irrelevant, and the athletes compete not just for physical superiority, but for a handful of winnings. These spoils include the ability to remove the mask from the loser (mascara contra mascara), the right to shave the loser’s head (mascara contra cabellera), and the right to literally end the losing wrestler’s career (mascara contra carrera). The stakes are incredibly high and the haircare is remarkably questionable.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Black’s memorable performance as Nacho Libre in the movie of the same title, FactoryMade believes exporting this phenomenon across the border to an American audience is a no-brainer. Despite the incredible saturation of the live wrestling market the rival World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) (two matches a day, everyday), FactoryMade seems to think there’s growth potential. They’ve even booked events at New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

If nothing else, Lucha Libre should provide an intriguing alternative to the WWE. With tired icons like Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker, predictable stunts like the chair smash, and a racially homogeneous cast of wrestlers and viewers, there seems no reason more progressive wrestling fans would not turn to Lucha Libre, whose cast of 250 colorful characters includes a homosexual wrestler in drag (Cassandro, “Queen of the Ring”). There’s even a “mini estrellas” division, designed for wrestlers fewer than five feet in height.

While it remains to be seen whether or not the two leagues can live in harmony, Lucha Libre certainly brings a bit more diversity to the table. While the WWE caters to a primarily white, Midwestern and Eastern audience, the Lucha Libre franchise seems to have its sights set on Mexican-American populations on the West Coast. In any case, a little more stylized wrestling has never done anyone any harm. —AS

MARCH 22 2013

NEWS

02

Growing Ca$h

What’s In Your Wallet?

by Anna Rotman and Emma Wohl Illustration by Olivia Kates

if you could design your own money, what would you put on it? Michael Giroux found inspiration from nature when designing Providence’s first alternative currency—CropCash.

The smallest denomination is a honeycomb, the next a tide.

Giroux is a member of the Fertile Underground Natural Cooperative and the designer of CropCash.The term currency is a stretch, Giroux told the Independent, given that it is not “money authorized by law.” The hand-stamped cards could never be confused for dollars, but that’s not the point: CropCash is a complimentary system of exchange.

The Fertile Underground runs a garden, a grocery store, a cafe, a work share, and soon a food truck, but this is their most ambitious project. The notes are already in use within the cooperative but are expected to take off on a larger scale in the next few months. CropCash is the printed form of Comb, a unit of currency based on labor; 3 Comb are worth roughly a day’s labor in any field. According to Giroux, it can be “used in interactions where dollars aren’t necessary.”

But in interactions where buyers and sellers exchange goods, CropCash works the same as cash, even if it is only accepted within a designated network of businesses. Shoppers at Fertile Underground’s store on Westminster can use a combination of CropCash, dollars, and credit.

Local currencies have been developed in towns in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. Stephanie Malin, a community sociologist at Brown University’s Urban Environmental Lab, told the Independent that microcurrencies are a way for communities to assert independence from a global economy that doesn’t serve local needs. In most situations, the currency doesn’t replace the legal tender.

Instead, consumers can opt in, purchase the alternative cash, and spend it at participating businesses. It gives participants the incentive to invest in the local economy instead of purchasing from larger corporations; WalMart Neighborhood Markets don’t accept local currencies, nor are their profits ever seen by their host communities. Proponents of alternative currencies hope that producers paid in local currency will in turn spend this cash on regional products and services and continue a cycle of growth.

Khym Carmichael, one of the cooperative’s 13 memberowners, came to Providence from Ithaca, New York, a town with one of the longest-running forms of alternative currency in the U.S. She expressed concern over the way the dollar arbitrarily fluctuates, obscuring the value of basic goods like food. CropCash, on the other hand, reflects what producers’ and laborers’ “energy is really worth.” Malin explained how micro-currencies like CropCash are a form of money

03 METRO

that reflects local values, values “that have thus far been externalized in the global financial system.”

We can’t all print money, though. One of the biggest obstacles this movement faces is how to convince would-be participants that these new currencies will be immune to inflation. Giroux’s solution is to base the number of notes printed on the real value of groceries in the store. Unlike the dollar, which is based on debt, CropCash is backed by the promise of goods available now. If all the participants wanted to exchange their CropCash today, they would have access to the $25,000 worth of groceries at Fertile Underground’s store; Giroux says he plans to cap the total amount in circulation after the next round of production at 400 Comb (the equivalent of $10,000).

It can be bought in the store at $25 per Comb, or $5 for one-fifth Comb. So far, the currency functions mostly as a gift card and a way of investing in the cooperative, since only Fertile Underground itself officially accepts it. But Giroux and Carmichael are hopeful about its expansion. By next season, which starts mid-summer, Giroux hopes to have half a dozen businesses in Providence accepting CropCash. Even though it’s only accepted at one business now, he emphasized, it can also be used in personal interactions outside the store.

He gave an example: a man came in to buy some groceries with CropCash his landlord had given him after he shovelled snow during a blizzard. This wasn’t an official transaction with a predetermined monetary value; the man just helped out during a blizzard. It’s hard to imagine all workers accepting their wages in a resource with such limited use. Still, such a transaction guarantees that capital remains within the community.

If given their space, micro-currencies can become a community institution. In some cities, established local currencies are acceptable tender at community banks and credit unions. In others, they can be used to pay partial taxes.

Don’t be fooled by the playful colors and charming names; CropCash means business.

BerkShares Stockbridge Mohicans, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, and Norman Rockwell are all pictured on BerkShares notes, the alternative currency of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Over three million BerkShares have been issued since they were launched in 2006. Among the things you can buy with them at over 400 businesses: a teeth cleaning, a wedding ring, and a limousine ride. Each Mohican (one BerkShare) costs $.95, which gives consumers

a five percent discount on all purchases made with the local currency. This gives businesses taking BerkShares the incentive to keep the Normans circulating—by paying their distributors with them, for example—instead of cashing them in for dollars.

Ithaca Hours ithaca hours, used at over 900 businesses in Ithaca, New York, is one of the country’s longest-running forms of alternative currency. The term “hours” implies that the system rewards time spent in service to the city and “builds our community pride and connections,” according to the Ithaca Hours website. When the currency began in 1991, the minimum hourly wage in Tompkins County in upstate New York was 10 dollars, and that’s still its value to this day.

The general rule is that one Hour is worth one hour’s work, but it’s up to those involved in the transaction to decide.

Businesses determine what percentage of a purchases can be paid in Hours, and employees at some local businesses have agreed to accept partial wages in Hours. Ithaca Hours’ timebased economic system is a widespread phenomenon, one step beyond barter, which allows person-to-person transactions without relying on the Federal Reserve to determine currency’s value. Recently, however, the use of Hours has begun to decline, most likely because Paul Glover, the inventor of Ithaca Hours and one of its most dedicated evangelists, moved out of the town. Fewer businesses accept it, and the rise of electronic banking over cash exchange has made it seem retrograde. Others have stepped in to fill Glover’s shoes, but the future of a local currency once so successful it attracted the interest of one of Beijing’s largest think-tanks is now unclear. rCredit According to their website, the ‘r’ stands for “Regenerative, Revolutionary, Responsible Resilience.” They are set to launch their trial runs in Greenfield, MA and New London, CT in the upcoming months. The credits are sold on par with the US dollar and are circulated entirely electronically. The creators see themselves as the next generation of alternative currencies: sales will be tracked online to monitor RCredit circulation so that stores will not end up with a stockpile of credits they can’t unload. The nonprofit that runs rCredit, Common Good Finance, hopes to eventually expand to towns across the Northeast.

ANNA ROTMAN B’ 14.5 & EMMA WOHL B’ 14 are worth the energy.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AUDITORY INPUT Inside Providence Talks

by Simon Engler Illustration by Katy Windemuth dr. james morgan, a brown university developmental psychologist who studies early childhood language acquisition, holds up a pair of toddler’s overalls. They are patterned with bright circles; on the chest section is a snap-close pouch, about the size of the deck of cards. It looks like something might fit inside.

“Yes,” Dr. Morgan says, “this is the garment for the device.” the device is a digital language processor (DLP), a compact sensor developed by the Colorado-based Language Environment Analysis Foundation (LENA). DLPs are recording devices that count spoken words. They are designed to be worn by young children.

Plug a Digital Language Processor into a computer equipped with LENA’s software, and you will generate a complete picture of the audible language to which its wearer has been exposed. That means the total number of words heard in a day, along with the origin of those words and their frequency.

This is the technology behind Mayor Angel Taveras’s most recent city initiative, Providence Talks, which aims to improve language skills of young children in the city’s poorest families.

The initiative was Providence’s winning entry to the Mayor’s Challenge, a contest organized by Bloomberg Philanthropies which offered nine million dollars in funding to municipal governments with innovative plans for urban improvement.

Providence, which took first place on March 13, was awarded five million dollars; Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and Santa Monica took one million dollars each. Now, Mayor Taveras and City Hall hope to improve the language ability of Providence’s youngest through a venture into the technology of developmental psychology. researchers have been aware of the linguistic deficiency of young children from low-income families since the mid1960s. Thirty years later, in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, authored Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, the most comprehensive study on the subject. According to their analysis, children from families on welfare were typically exposed to millions of fewer words than their wealthier counterparts by age four.

This inequity has serious effects. Children with insufficient exposure to spoken language take longer to understand the meanings of the sentences they hear. Extracting ideas from the jumble of sounds and pitches that make up language is an incredibly complex process, and mastering it demands practice—lots of it. According to the work of Hart and Risley, ideal linguistic development requires children to be exposed to at least 21,000 words per day. What the words are isn’t particularly important. Furthermore, all languages are equally beneficial to development, and so LENA’s technology is programmed to recognize both English and Spanish. What counts in linguistic development is exposure, not variety. Simply put, the more a parent speaks to a child, the more that child will learn.

MARCH 22 2013

Linguistic development is time-sensitive. Only up to age four are most children’s brains wired for rapid language acquisition. That’s why children with a low exposure to spoken language at an early age end up having difficulty extracting ideas from words—and, thus, performing well—in elementary school.

Providence’s grade-school literacy rates speak for themselves—the city has a problem. According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, only one out of every three children in the district begins kindergarten at an appropriate literacy level. And economically disadvantaged students in city elementary schools have on average tested at lower reading levels than their classmates in every year since 2003. lena’s technology won’t improve the language skills of Providence children by itself. As Dr. Morgan, the Brown University psychologist, told the Independent, a DLP “does absolutely nothing” on its own. It simply produces data. But Providence officials hope to use that data to dramatically impact the way parents interact with their children.

According to Toby Shepherd, the Mayor’s deputy director of policy, eligibility for participation in Providence Talks will coincide with eligibility for general visitation from the Department of Health. Families will be targeted based on a preexisting newborn screening process testing for developmental disorders that is administered in Rhode Island hospitals. Families deemed eligible for general home visitation services during the screening process would likewise qualify for participation in Providence Talks. Engagement with the program will be free and voluntary, and to ensure user privacy, only abstract data about word count and word origins—and not actual audio recordings—will be stored on DLPs. The next step will be the delivery of DLPs to participating families.

Workers from the Department of Health will instruct parents in the use of the device, which must be worn for a few days each month for the necessary data to be retrieved.

Later, workers will return to households to pick up the DLPs for processing at a central

location. Finally, the processed information will be returned to families. DOH workers will review the results with parents, explain their significance, and discuss potential strategies for improvement, like interactive games, bedtime stories, and creative play.

After that, the responsibility for change will lie with households. DOH workers will encourage families to take the education of their young children into their own hands, but the program will not prescribe particular educational activities to the families it will serve. As Shepherd told the Independent, “This is about empowering parents.” pilot studies have proven the effectiveness of this strategy. According to a statement released by the Mayor’s Office, parents who learn that their children have not been exposed to enough language tend to increase their word usage by an average of 55 percent.

The effects of such an increase can be enormous. IQ levels in children are strongly correlated with language exposure. In fact, Risley and Hart pointed out that language exposure outstrips all other variables—including socioeconomic status—as a predictor of juvenile intelligence. And the benefits extend to all speakers of all languages.

Only a few children will be enrolled in Providence Talks in the coming year, but by 2018, City Hall hopes to have expanded the program’s reach to nearly 3,000 families. Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds the program, has encouraged other cities to consider following Providence’s example.

As Toby Shepherd, the Mayor’s deputy director of policy, told the Independent, “it’s a pretty novel program, and it could be replicated.” With funding and planning, programs like Providence’s could improve the language ability of children across the country.

SIMON ENGLER B’14 simply produces data.

METRO

04

PAINTING THE CORNERS I went to my first baseball game at age five. My dad’s friend, who had taken it upon himself to make me a baseball fan, led me up the many steps to the Reserve Level of Dodger Stadium. For what felt like miles, all I could see were the backs of fans filing into the stadium. Before the turnstile, he turned to me and waxed poetic: it might take a lot of walking to get there, but the baseball diamond is a magical space, a sanctuary, an escape. A few minutes later, the sea of backs parted. I stood in the stadium concourse, looking out.

I saw emerald green grass with a tan diamond, framed in 16:9 cinema perspective by two large pillars and the grandstand of the upper deck—a near-panoramic view of the field’s expanse, from foul line to foul line.

Baseball is all about framing.

Baseball’s graphic representation is the box score, which organizes statistical information and game summaries into frames for newsprint. Catchers frame pitches to make them look closer to the strike zone than they actually are.

Innings, the sport’s basic temporal unit, are also called frames.

There is one man who has been framing the game for Dodgers fans for over half a century. That man is Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully.

Scully, an Irish Catholic born in the Bronx, started calling Dodger baseball in 1950 when the team was still based in Brooklyn. He moved with the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. When the Dodgers first came to LA, they lacked a proper stadium. The team played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, originally built for the 1932 Olympics. The space was so large and so improperly configured for baseball that fans began to bring transistor radios to the ballpark, both to learn about the players on their newfound home team and to aid in comprehending the action on the field. Vin Scully introduced Los Angeles to its Dodgers.

Scully calls the game both for radio and television.

05 SPORTS

He frames the lives of his listeners, bringing continuity to LA’s disjointed spaces of work, car, and home. As Robert Creamer explains in Sports Illustrated, “When a homerushing driver bogs down in a classic freeway traffic jam, he finds that nothing else is as soothing as Vin Scully’s voice describing the opening innings of a Dodger night game just getting under way… a man who drives home from

work listening to an exciting game is not about to abandon it when he reaches his house. As a result, millions of southern Californians have Vin Scully with their supper.” scully is rarely seen from the waist down. At the beginning of every Dodgers broadcast, we’re graced with the same shot. The camera captures Scully’s cherubic smile,

his suit hanging on his shoulders. A pocket square peeking out matches his well-pressed shirt. He stands in front of the emerald green, framed in 16:9 cinema perspective, the near-panoramic expanse of the stadium as his backdrop.

He has the best seat in the house, as if he’s right there in the concourse, one fan among many, yet still above the rest. He is the Los Angeles Dodgers’ omniscient narrator.

Every night he welcomes us: “Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be.” And with that, he begins the next chapter in the Dodgers’ story.

In his study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson links the origins of nationalism to the development of the novel. According to Anderson, the form of the novel presents a type of storytelling that allows for simultaneity, an experience of time that connects otherwise disconnected peoples. The novel hinges on the use of “meanwhile,” the use of juxtaposition to tie many strands into one larger picture. Substitute fandom for nationalism, and Vin Scully’s narration becomes the backbone of baseball as novel.

Indeed, Scully has the rare ability to turn a game into a literary work. He constantly interrupts narratives with statistics or description of the action.

There’s no set length for an at-bat in baseball; they can last anywhere from twenty seconds to ten minutes. Scully has mastered the art of fitting an entire story into a flexible timeline. He does this with an expert use of “meanwhile.”

He juggles and weaves the stories of the hitter, the pitcher, their history together, the batter on-deck, the runners-onbase, and the coaches standing behind them. A continuous flow, interrupted only by the breaks between innings.

An excerpt from the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game: Here is Joe Amalfitano to pinch-hit for Don Kessinger. Amalfitano is from Southern California, from San Pedro. He was an original bonus boy with the Giants. Joey’s been around, and as we mentioned earlier, he has helped to beat the Dodgers twice, and on deck is Harvey Kuenn. Kennedy is tight to the bag at third, the fastball, a strike. Oh and one with one out in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Vin Scully’s Final Year

by Tristan Rodman Illustration by Casey Friedman the ninth inning, one to nothing, Dodgers. Sandy reading, into his windup and the strike one pitch: curveball, tapped foul, oh and two. And Amalfitano walks away and shakes himself a little bit, and swings the bat. And Koufax with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt and walks behind the mound.

I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world. Sandy fussing, looks in to get his sign, oh and two to Amalfitano. The strike two pitch to Joe: fastball, swung on and missed, strike three.

He is one out away from the promised land, and Harvey Kuenn is comin’ up.

So Harvey Kuenn is batting for Bob Hendley. The time on the scoreboard is 9:44. The date, September the ninth, nineteen-sixty-five, and Koufax working on veteran Harvey Kuenn. Sandy into his windup and the pitch, a fastball for a strike. He has struck out, by the way, five consecutive batters, and that’s gone unnoticed. Sandy ready and the strike one pitch: very high, and he lost his hat. He really forced that one. That’s only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Sandy threw instead of pitched, trying to get that little extra, and that time he tried so hard his hat fell off — he took an extremely long stride to the plate— and Torborg had to go up to get it.

One and one to Harvey Kuenn. Now he’s ready: fastball, high, ball two. You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup and the two-one pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike two. It is 9:46 p.m.

Two and two to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch: Swung on and missed, a perfect game.

Scully then goes silent for a full 38 seconds, letting the crowd do his job for him. In an article for Salon, Gary Kaufman calls it “the best piece of baseball writing [he’s] ever seen,” made all the more impressive because, “it came off the top of his head, at a moment when, like the man whose feat he was describing, he knew he had to be at the top of his game.”

Scully, like other great narratorial voices, has stylistic signatures: tight metaphor and a haunting use of silence.

Bob Gibson “pitches like he’s double parked.” Tom Glavine is “like a tailor: a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” Statistics “are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.” His use of language is clean and efficient, drawing from a tradition of radio broadcasting where it was necessary to paint a vivid image for an audience removed

MARCH 22 2013

from any view of the field. He never lets linguistic flare get in the way of the moment, always backing away from the microphone when many broadcasters would seize the moment as an opportunity to define their own careers. After Koufax’s no-hitter, Scully let the crowd make the call. After Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series, Scully stayed mum as Gibson went all the way around the bases.

When he finally spoke again, the words he chose carried so much weight that they’ve become, perhaps, his most notable: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

Scully’s past few years have seen a slight reduction in both workload and linguistic accuracy. When Matt Kemp and Jeff Kent batted back-to-back in 2008, Scully had particular trouble enunciating and distinguishing the two names. He no longer travels with the team east of the Rocky Mountains.

Scully may no longer be as sharp, but he’s just as witty, carrying enthusiasm for new knowledge and technology in even greater proportion. During catcher A.J. Ellis’ sixth inning at-bat in a game against the Rockies on August 3, Scully launched into a passage about the new things he’d learned over the course of the season.

runners this year; four have scored. Manny is from Panama City in Panama. He’ll be thirty, December the third. Big man, six-three, lean, about one seventy-five and a slider hit to right center and deep. On his horse and watching it go over the wall is DeJesus. A.J. Ellis! He’s really got something trending!

A few days later, Scully attempted to lipread a tirade from irate Rockies manager Jim Tracy, converting it into TVappropriate language on the fly: “He caught the ball,” Jim says. “He caught the blinkin’ ball.”

“He caught the darn ball.” [Tracy gets ejected]. Uh oh, he’s gone. He is gone. “That is blinkin’ fertilizer.” I’m doing the best to translate. “You’ve gotta be blinkin’ me.”

the 2013 baseball season will be Scully’s 64th and final season calling Dodgers games. He plans to retire at the end of the year, and even though this is his third attempt at retirement in as many years, the sense is that this year he’s for real. The past few years have been disappointing ones for the Dodgers, as they’ve suffered while Frank McCourt dragged the team through bankruptcy court, slashing payroll and fan confidence as he went. This year is the first You know this year, more than many years, I have a great deal full year for the Dodgers under a new ownership group, of gratitude for the all the folks listening on radio and watching one that has drastically increased the payroll and improved on television. Pitch in for a strike, one and one. For instance, talent, renewing the team’s commitment to a fanbase lost earlier this year I learned about a soul patch—that little bit of by the penny-pinching and pocket-lining of the McCourts. beard. One ball, one strike. That’s a strike. One and two. Then Scully came back to see the Dodgers contend. In Scully’s of course, the great discovery. [Rockies shortstop] Troy Tulowitlast year, he faces a steep task: bring a disenfranchised zki‘s hairdo: a mullet! Boy, that, that really put me in line. So baseball community back to Los Angeles, where basketball now I know about a soul patch and a mullet. And then the other and the possibility of a new football team reign supreme. night, talked about a—a “tweet,” only I called it a “twit,” but If anybody can accomplish this, it’s Vin Scully. who once I-I-I thought it was a “twit,” since it’s Twitter. A drive to the gap strung together a fanbase in Los Angeles where there previin left-center. There’s nobody there. It will drop for a base hit, ously was none. and holding with the single is Ellis. So anyway, I’m really up Baseball is a particularly difficult game for many in our to date now on Twitter. But I do think for all of you folks who generation to embrace: it moves slowly, sometimes not at are tweeting out there, you gotta get something TRENDING. all. It’s modernity’s pastime, but we’re in the information WHOOOOA. So maybe we ought to get something trending age. If the NBA has taken so well to Twitter, it’s possible about A.J. Ellis. And if you do that, you know what? I’m cool. that baseball is still stuck in the newspaper box score.

I’m really cool.

Frequently I’m asked, “Why do you like baseball?” Invariably, I have two answers. First, the 16:9 cinema perspecDodgers fans reponded to the call to action, and by Ellis’s tive, the view from the top, the place where I go to freeze next at-bat in the seventh, Scully let us know: “They’re trend- time in three-hour increments every summer. And the man ing, twittering, tweeting A.J. Ellis all over the US and to be who turns players into characters, seasons into stories, and honest they told me to say that. Ah, he’s a nice boy.” Ellis hit makes me equally proud to be an Angelino and a Dodgers a home run on the next pitch. fan. It’s impossible to imagine anybody else greeting the In Scully’s words: fans on a breezy Wednesday in May: “Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be.”

Manny Corpas, a veteran reliever, will now become the fourth pitcher for Chicago, facing A.J. Ellis of Twitter fame. Manny TRISTAN RODMAN B’ 15 pitches like he’s double Corpas has certainly been around. Corpas inherited fourteen parked.

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06

Cups and Needles Holistic Medicine in Rhode Island

by Alix Taylor Illustration by Adriana Gallo

if you wind your way past a wholesale pottery store to 14 Imperial Place in Providence’s Jewelry District and climb up some of the narrowest stairs you’ll ever encounter, you’ll find yourself in the soothing oasis of Emerging Energy Acupuncture. Mary Claire Dilks, who opened the practice in 2004, sports purple cat eye glasses and looks perfectly at home in the multi-room suite. It’s painted in a soft blue with bamboo and the occasional Chinese scroll hanging on the walls.

As the daughter of a new-age yoga mom who claims to have found her personal god in Hatha breathing, I had a natural interest in the practice of holistic medicine, and Emerging Energy Acupuncture seemed like a good first stop. When I first called Mary Dilks to arrange our meeting I had no idea what to expect from a “licensed doctor of acupuncture and board certified Chinese herbologist.” But my ideas of integrative medicine as a crunchy fad were dispelled as Dilks and I discussed the growth of holistic and alternative medicine in Rhode Island. “Obviously if you have an emergency, go to the hospital; don’t come to me,” she told me, “but there are other answers for chronic pain and illness.”

“Sometimes Western medicine doesn’t quite cut it,” she told me, a sentiment that resounds throughout my conversations with holistic medicine practitioners. Dilks battled chronic fatigue through her teenage years, cycling through countless waiting rooms and blood tests. She felt trapped in her body, unable to experience the activities her peers enjoyed.

Eventually, though, she discovered the power of alternative medicine.

Around that time, Dilks began to explore eastern philosophy and meditation, going on to receive her BA in Philosophy from Loyola in Chicago, and studying Chinese medicine at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. Her study of Chinese medicine moved her from the Chicago campus to New York City. From there she made her way to Providence, where she opened her practice, which includes acupuncture, cupping and diet and nutritional therapy. Acupuncture stimulates acupoints along 14 major energy channels to restore the balance and flow of Chi in the body. Cupping, Dilks explains, targets those same pressure points along the 14 meridians with suction instead of needles.

“The majority of my patients come to me as a last resort.

They’ve been dealing with issues like chronic pain for years before they make it to me,” Dilks says. Many times doctors will recommend her practice to patients who haven’t seen results from Western medicine. But according to the young practitioner, that’s starting to change: “I started my practice at a good time in the culture. Lots of medical studies have been emerging proving the power of alternative medicine.”

According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative medicine, 3.1 million people tried acupuncture in 2007, one million more than in 2002, and those numbers are continuing to grow. Insurance companies are even starting to cover some of the cost of acupuncture, depending on the symptoms it treats. That trend may also draw more patients to Dilks, whose average rate is $120 for initial appointments and $75 per hour for follow-ups.

When I asked Dilks about the results she’s been able to achieve with acupuncture and diet, she told me the story of the youngest patient she’s treated in her practice. A sevenyear-old boy came to Dilks’ office with extreme asthma, a condition he had been battling since he was under a year old.

With herbs and acupuncture, Dilks was able to move him from breathing machine and multiple inhalers down to just the occasional inhaler. “suffering draws people to holistic care,” Karlo Burger told me over the phone. Dilks recommended that I contact Burger, a shiatsu practitioner and teacher who has been trying to build a community of hollistic healthcare practicioners in the Providence area. In 1999 Burger founded the Integrative Medicine Alliance, an independent non-profit network of

07 METRO

“conventional and complementary/alternative medicine practitioners and people seeking healthcare.” He also maintains shiatsu practices in Providence and Cambridge, MA. In 2002, Rhode Island followed Minnesota’s lead and adopted the Unlicensed Healthcare Practices Act, which makes it easier for holistic practitioners like Burger to practice their healing methods. The act allows practitioners of healing techniques that do not include “surgery, x-ray radiation, prescribing, administering, or dispensing legend drugs and controlled substances, practices that invade the human body by puncture of the skin, setting fractures,” as well as the practices of dentistry, chiropractic medicine, and acupuncture, to operate without a license. Similar statutes exist in California, Florida, and Idaho.

Burger explained shiatsu, a traditional Japanese healing art whose name translates as “finger pressure,” as acupuncture without needles. Unlike acupuncture, however, shiatsu doesn’t have a special certification requirement. Without the certification process, shiatsu has stayed out of the mainstreamed holistic movements—as opposed to acupuncture and chiropractic medicine, which has a licensing procedure in all fifty states. Shiatsu remains, at most, a practice worked into the curriculum of massage schools. But Burger tries to work around that. Because insurance companies aren’t picking up the tab, Burger offers “community shiatsu,” a process in which couples or groups are diagnosed and trained by a professional, then practice treatments on each other. Because it happens in a group, it is more affordable than one-on-one treatments.

Both practitioners claimed the ease with which holistic practitioners can work in Rhode Island makes it difficult to build a community. “It’s impossible to get people together,” Dilks told me in her office. According to Dilks, there had been meetings to bring together the licensed doctors of acupuncture in Rhode Island, but “typically people who practice acupuncture like to do their own thing.” Burger saw a similar response to his own initiative to bring together practitioners, “It’s like herding cats.” Burger noted that while the freedom Rhode Island allows for holistic practices to evolve and include interesting work like shiatsu and homeopathy, it also inhibits the possibility of growth brought on by unifying disparate practices in the community. Still, Burger speaks optimistically when discussing his practice in Rhode Island; the Unlicensed Healthcare Practices Act “follows a line of tolerance in the state dating back to Roger Williams.”

Alternative, complementary, or holistic medicine remains a field with many different courses of practice, of which Burger’s and Dilk’s are just two. The field as a whole seems to be gaining more credence. In a June 2012 meeting of an advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services discussing the illness Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, committee chair Gailen Marshall highlighted holistic medicine’s ability to adapt to individuals’ problems: “Too many times there’s an arrogance in Western medicine that says if we can’t give a pill or do a procedure, it’s not real and if it is real, it’s the patient’s problem, not the doctor’s. The holistic approach to care says that a person has a body, a person has a mind, and a person has a spirit—some people might call that a soul—and you must minister to all three of those to properly care for a patient.”

In between discussions of cutting-edge medical procedures, Marshall took time to show how alternative medical practices share common ideals with the broader medical community and encourage his fellows to treat it with an open mind. The care holistic practitioners give is based on “a Hippocratic principle that I was taught in the early ‘80s when I went to medical school. I continue to try to teach that to my trainees.

While we espouse it, unfortunately, sometimes we talk the talk and we don’t walk the walk.”

ALIX TAYLOR B’ 15 is more than a passing trend.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE RITE OF SPRING

Music by Igor Stravinsky, Choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky

by Robert Sandler i went to see the turned-in feet of Le Sacre moving still, under the curtain.

Pagan Russia still moving Nijinsky’s flatness.

All the ballet made my friend vomit. I felt bad too, viscerally, on the shaped chairs, but I am not vomiting. I felt fine, good even. I felt as though I was looking at a painting while in the middle of a play, on stage, on a stone floor, with wool cinching at the shoulders of my fellow actors’ costumes.

Things are caught in muscle and skin. A scar. Tying a knot. The dancers had to loosen themselves, fill a space in their bodies for this history and enact this.

I think that their rigidness was bound by this history. Their flatness was about representation, they moved between themselves.

It is very cold outside, but soon I will be able to say, “I am drinking beer in my apartment. I just made peas—they are sweet. Settle, or whatever you need to do, and then call me. Please.” This is because the weather should be changing soon.

When I got home from the ballet, I turned on the heat. Serena’s socks on top of the gray gas square caught on fire. I waved a towel and the fan started to rotate. Then I put the charred socks in her room and lay in my bed.

One of the men had very large thighs, we saw them, because he danced a lead role in the performances leading up to Le Sacre. Unable to sleep, I masturbated with thoughts of his legs.

The performance was an attempt at reconstructing the original choreography.

It was discarded after the first performances; the original choreography remained untouched. The Joffrey ballet revived it in the 1987. Watching the ballet, you are watching 100 years forward trying to move 100 years back.

Can you see who moves like that?

Maybe my vomiting friend was filled with the Paris of 1913, and all the hissing was expelled from her.

My vomiting friend was a dancer. Maybe the hissing ghosts were expelled from her.

If you tie a knot, and you have before, a little ghost comes and crawls into your fingers.

An untrained body is making ghosts, fumbling towards a knot or a scar. A part of the body that remembers.

This is the picture from the photo booth at the theatre. Everyone is blurry except for my friend who was sick afterwards. So maybe we were ghosts too, in the moment, except for my friend, who was bound to the history we set about imbibing: the girl dancing herself to death, towards ghosts.

When I dance, I think about untrained bodies. I value them because this is the body that I have—it is awkward. I like the way that it is gangly. When I dance I try to find every beat with every part of my body.

The dancers in Le Sacre are often on seperate parts of the stage, in different circles. They follow different beats. Because of this, you can’t rehearse with one person yelling numbers. Each group follows their own bit of order.

The dancers in Le Sacre are asked to forget about their elongated limbs, about the elegance they have worked towards.

When I have performed in front of others, I have closed my eyes. Once, I ran into a wall with a deer spine wrapped around my arm.

Dancers are versed in a particular grammar and lexicon. They speak a language. Nijinsky gave his dancers a shallow language; they had to try and talk about life and death with their big toes turned towards one another.

Their elbows are raised to their shoulders. When the sacrificed girl jumps, her knees point to the left, the legs do not come out from underneath her body.

MARCH 22 2013

When we were walking through Providence after Le Sacre the wind tried to bury itself in us. When I got home there was a skunk eating the food my landlord leaves out for the neighborhood cats. It looked at me.

Everyone is throwing up. If this is true, then maybe everyone is filled with ghosts, or maybe it wasn’t the ballet. Please stay hydrated. My friend is drinking Gatorade, maybe you could drink that too, ghosts or not.

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“the last time i played a show, the audience was pornographic with cameras,” Ian MacKaye says, scowling out over the crowd assembled in front of him. “Let’s all put our devices away and try to just be present for this one.” A few audience members sheepishly lower iPhones; one man in front of me tucks a hefty DSLR behind his back, the zoom lens jutting out into the audience like another limb.

Most audience members look amused at the request, but not surprised. MacKaye is well known for his cantankerous style.

Ian MacKaye is one half of The Evens; the other half is his wife, Amy Farina. Both are dressed unassumingly in jeans and solid dark t-shirts. MacKaye wears a slouchy black beanie, though he is now almost 51. The two are playing in the charter school’s pale green assembly room. MacKaye is the former frontman of Teen Idles, Minor Threat and Fugazi, famous DC hardcore bands. Farina is the former drummer for DC rock darlings Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. The two married and later formed The Evens, a minimalist duo of drums and guitar backing soft, almost mumbled vocals, and have released three albums together: The Evens (2005), Get Evens (2006), and in November of last year, The Odds.

Home for winter break, a bunch of friends and I are at The Evens’ fundraiser show for the Next Step Public Charter School in Washington, DC. It costs five dollars, which has been the going rate for any MacKaye show since Minor Threat first hit it big. The school, which serves mainly older immigrants trying to get a high school diploma while working, used to be the site of the Wilson Center, a hotbed of punk shows and radical activism in the ’80s. As the show fills with black-clad original punks, I start to feel like I’m peering into someone else’s high school reunion. ian mackaye is a punk legend, even beyond DC But he’s remained in his hometown for his whole life, returning to this city after every tour. He has donated most of the proceeds from his albums and shows to local causes and non-profits.

His bands sang about homelessness and police violence, and the money they made from recordings went to shelters and public health clinics in D.C. MacKaye began as the frontman for the Teen Idles during high school, a band that has been labelled one of the first DC hardcore bands. After high school, the Teen Idles disbanded and he and several friends started a new band, Minor Threat.

It was the early ’80s, and DC was experiencing the AIDs crisis and had just been introduced to crack cocaine. MacKaye had grown up the son of a newspaper editor, in the affluent Glover Park neighborhood on the northwest side of the city.

DC was, and still is, one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in the country; the northwest is full of lush parks and independent bookstores, the southeast is a flat, tree-

09 ARTS

less land where the blocks of row houses are often described as blighted.

Minor Threat only made it three years before disbanding in 1983; their most significant legacy was arguably the coining of “straight-edge,” the now-ubiquitous term for leading a drug, alcohol- (and often meat-) free life. In Minor Threat’s hit song, “Straight Edge,” MacKaye sang: “I’m a person just like you/ but I’ve got better things to do/ than sit around and fuck my head.” The song, based in MacKaye’s personal philosophy of sober living (defined as abstaining from alcohol, drugs, and casual sex), spread a new punk ethos; straight edge was an attempt to broach the occasional nihilism of punk music and connect it with a radical politics that called for active personal and systemic change. Straight edge has persisted as a punk subculture ever since.

MacKaye went on to form Fugazi in 1987, a much more musically coherent band with the same punk ethos. Shows were still only five dollars, and all the money raised went to the causes MacKaye and bandmates were singing about.

The band members were older, and so was their audience.

MacKaye was no longer screaming about staying straight to high schoolers; he and his band crafted measured but still chaotic tirades about the state of the city. In “Cashout” (2001), MacKaye sings about corruption and eminent domain: “It’s official/ development wants this neighborhood /gone so the city just wants the same/ talking about process and dismissal/forced removal of the people on the corner.”

Fugazi hit it big, but they never left Dischord Records.

Until they disbanded in 2003, they continued playing cheap shows in small venues in DC and all over the world, always donating the majority of their proceeds. They wouldn’t allow audience members to mosh or slam dance because aggressive dancing often hurt women and younger audience members.

They mainly played in all-ages venues, and didn’t sell albums or merchandise at their shows to avoid commercialization of their music.

In 2001, just before Fugazi broke up, MacKaye and Farina formed The Evens. After playing in huge venues with Fugazi, some of which relied heavily on alcohol sales to furnish profit, MacKaye was interested in splitting off from any reliance on the commercial music scene. MacKaye and Farina dealt with this by keeping their set almost acoustic, which lowered their production costs and made it so that they could play anywhere with little equipment. the anachronism of a camera-less show is kind of exciting, kind of uncomfortable, when I realize how much time I spend documenting my daily existence and then disseminating it via social media. For my generation, attending a show without being able to digitally capture a

memento might almost defeat the purpose of being there, but as I look around I realize that my five friends and I are the only people of our age present. Most attendees look to be in their forties or fifties, save for the gaggle of under-ten year olds on the stage, assumedly the children of older attendees.

The stage looks almost like a living room, with a small rug under the drum set and two floor lamps framing MacKaye and Farina, though I have no photographs to remind me of the exact set-up. A red DC hardcore flag has been pinned up on the wall behind the duo; the triple stars of the district’s official banner replaced with the straight-edge triple X. On one side of the stage, a group of eclectically-dressed children has gathered, some wiggling around to the music, others still and focused intently on the band as the play. One boy has closed his eyes as he mouths along with the words.

All of the kids are wearing lavishly large and brightly colored protective headphones, a sure sign of their parents’ punkrock status. I assume one is Carmine Francis, MacKaye and Farina’s four-year-old son, but I’m not sure which, because all of the kids seem to be intimately familiar with the lyrics to the songs. Some jam out on complex air-guitars; at the end of each song a few boys yell out requests.

Their favorite seems to be “Wanted Criminals,” a song about the police and private prison industry; the admittedly catchy chorus repeats “jails in search of criminals” over a furious guitar riff. MacKaye plays the song at the request of the cheering children; but not before prefacing it with a lengthy pontification on the role of the police in DC. A few minutes into his thoughts, he pauses and looks out at the audience. “I promise I don’t think about the police all the time.” Farina cocks her eyebrows and chuckles, “That is just not true.” it’s hard to imagine, looking at Arlington, VA, now, that in 1981, MacKaye’s record label, Dischord Records, moved their operations to a small bungalow home there because it was less expensive than renting space in the District. I grew up in Arlington, a fairly affluent and loudly liberal suburb just across the Potomac River from DC. The metro corridor of Arlington—the central urban areas of the city built up around the DC metro stops—is now replete with high-rise condos, shiny townhouses and upscale chain stores.

Dischord Records operated out of a small house only blocks away from this metro corridor for over twenty years; it was outfitted with a practice space, a design studio, and a darkroom over the years, and temporarily housed many DC punks and passers-through. The house, still owned by MacKaye but out of use as Dischord’s base, is tucked behind unassuming suburban shrubbery only a few miles from the house where I grew up. Minor Threat played at least a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FOREVER ON THE EDGE

Punk Never Dies—It Just Gets Old

by Megan Hauptman

Illustration by Lizzie Davis

few shows in my high school’s cafeteria in the ’80s; Black Flag, another DC punk legend, played at our school’s prom sometime in that decade. i started listening to MacKaye’s music in the eighth grade, when a boy I had a huge crush on made me a mix CD with some Fugazi songs on it. I rocked out to “Give Me the Core” with my dad while driving to school in the morning, trying to cultivate the appropriate punk-rockness to impress the object of my affection.

In high school, I fell into the burgeoning DC punk youth scene. In December of my freshman year, I went to Positive Youth Fest for the first time, a weekend of punk shows and DIY workshops at a space called the Warehouse Next Door. I never really figured out how to blend into the punk aesthetic, but I went to Positive Youth Fest every year of high school, and even helped to organize it my junior year. This iteration of DC punk was just as angry as their ’80s forebears, and many of them had embraced that generation’s straight-edge lifestyle, but the two scenes seemed be glancing at each other across some sort of generational chasm.

The DIY punk shows I attended were overwhelmingly young; the main point of overlap with the still extant punks of the ’80s was St. Stephen’s Church, an Episcopalian church and occasional show venue in Columbia Heights. St. Stephen’s, which was MacKaye’s family’s church in the seventies, serves as the unofficial headquarters for Positive Force DC, an activist collective headed mainly by a cadre of 80s punk rockers. Ian MacKaye had his fiftieth birthday party at the church in March of 2012. St. Stephen’s also has served as a venue for two Positive Youth Fests, as well as a variety of other shows populated mainly by the under-25 generation.

kid doesn’t make you forget about how fucked up things are; if anything, MacKaye and Farina now have even more of a stake in improving DC’s future.

In an interview with NPR in December, the interviewer asked MacKaye and Farina what it would mean for them to have a rebellious kid. Farina answered, “Well, he wanted to be a police officer for Halloween.”

MacKaye paused a little bit longer before answering. “I remember being in high school and being struck by, like, the rebels,” he said. “Like, the rebellious people were largely the people who were self-destructing. And it seemed, like, what a shame. That’s their only option in this culture, that you have to destroy yourself? And I thought, well, that’s just ridiculous.

But, honestly, I haven’t really thought about—I mean, right now, like, what does our son have to do to rebel? He has to take 25 minutes to put his shoes on. That’s a form of rebellion that will drive you crazy, you know?”

Punk is still alive in DC, in a youth culture where new bands are constantly being formed and shows are being

organized. But it also lives in the continued work of activists like Positive Force DC and musicians like MacKaye, who continue to produce challenging, political, pissed-off music even, as they become the parental authority to potential future punks.

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B’14.5 was a police officer for Halloween.

for an aspiring punk with a dislike for screaming and moshpits, The Evens, with their incisively political lyrics delivered in a pared-down style, played exactly the kind of music I wanted to embrace. They sang about DC politics, police brutality, gentrification, depression, apathy. The tried and true punk topics were now hushed and crooned, so soft you could miss the anger if you weren’t listening to the words.

Their newest album, The Odds, features their reliably melodic condemnations, mellow and raging all at once.

The photograph on the album’s front cover shows an almost-silhouette of their son running toward the camera, foregrounded against the green, billowing shrubbery of what is probably the National Mall. The Capitol building looms in the background, a subtle reminder of the intrinsic geography in all of The Evens’ music. The album cover highlights the fact that these aging rockers are now, first and foremost, parents.

But the content of the album reminds listeners that having a

MARCH 22 2013

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*NSYNC

time of the month TMZ

m a r c h

m a d n e s s

Sheila Heti Day of the Dead

Die Another Day public intellectual

public urination Candy Crowley

clam chowder Susan B. Anthony

Pussy Be Yankin’ tequila

krumping ear candling

I Spy

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SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Zero Dark Thirty

two-four-six-eight Brickbreaker

pre-cum sTiCkY cApS

Weather.com juice cleanse

Diet of Worms Cobrasnake

Tiger mom UTI

timeshare Octomom

Six Flags “People love us on Yelp”

Eros

MARCH 22 2013

SPORTS

12

Science and the State The Underbelly of Government Sophistry

by John Aurelio Illustration by Jehane Samaha

president obama, in his State of the Union speech on February 12, called for a new era of scientific discovery. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race,” he declared. Yet just a few weeks after this bold call to action, the notorious sequester took effect, requiring $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts. According to White House estimates, the sequestration would cut US science budgets by 8.2 perecnt, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA among the hardest hit. “The sequestration itself was never intended to be implemented,” the report from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget notes. But here we are bracing for the impact of such austerity.

Amidst such economic hardship, the difference in the opinions of the public and our elected officials regarding scientific issues suggests a fundamental shift in our national priorities. In last year’s presidential primaries, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas claimed that greedy scientists rest on faulty data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” For such claims, Dr. Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University, faults what he sees as the cynicism associated with science in the United States. “The easier it becomes to depict the scientific enterprise as a special interest,” writes Dr. Miller, “the easier it becomes to reject scientific findings.” However, remarks like Gov. Perry’s are not shuttered in partisan gratification; misinformation and slander emerge from every front along the political spectrum. Unfortunately for Democrats, their progressive political allies often hold blatantly antiscience beliefs. Reacting to a frenzy surrounding the swine-flu vaccine, the CDC and the White House pulled multi-dose swine flu shots because they contained thimerasol, even though there is absolutely no evidence that supports a causal link between thimerasol and autism.

Such examples illustrate the danger of scientific illiteracy.

In a 2011 annual survey conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities, for example, 40 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “There is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.” This is a significant number in spite of the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community that global warming is, in fact, occurring. In a recently released study in Pediatrics, researchers examined parents’ reasons for not vaccinating their teenage daughters against HPV in 2008 through 2010. What the researchers found was a startling increase in the number of parents citing “Safety concerns/side effects” as their main factor. In 2008, it was 4.5 percent; by 2010, it had jumped to 16.4 percent.

This is not to say that science is without fault, its history brimming with missteps. Social Darwinism, for example, perverted the ideas of evolutionary science to uphold bigotry and racism. Regarding medical diagnoses, evidence-based reasoning has at times been overridden by cultural bias. There

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SCIENCE

was once a time when physicians diagnosed mental illness and “idiocy” based solely on appearance. Allan Hamilton, MD in 1883’s Types of Insanity: An Illustrated Guide to the Diagnosis of Mental Disease: “When one walks through the wards of any asylum for the insane, he will be immediately impressed with the repulsiveness of the faces about him.”

Committee Chairs and Charlatans elected officials should make choices only after scrutinizing the evidence presented. But this too is no guarantee of realistic policy. One stumbling block is the blatant ignorance shown by some politicians regarding scientific issues. Take, for example, Rep. Todd Akin, who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. During his 2012 campaign, Akin remarked, “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, [that] if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Not only is this view biologically unsound, it is a clear indication of his lack of scientific expertise. In spite of this, Akin served on a committee that dictates the future of our national science policy.

There are also politicians who view the world in ways that will never reconcile with scientific consensus. Rep. Paul Broun is a creationist who sits on the same committee as Akin. In a speech made on behalf of the Liberty Baptist Church, Broun proclaimed, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.” The committee’s chair, Rep. Ralph Hall, lumps “global freezing” together with global warming, which he doesn’t believe humans can significantly impact. As he says, “I don’t think we can control what God controls.”

Yet even amidst such disparity in worldviews, these politicians return to the alleged menacing motives of science.

On the same committee, Rep. Mo Brooks said of scientific findings regarding climate change,“We’re being asked to undermine America’s economy based on this guesswork speculation.” Rep. Brooks still trots out the same debunked notion that a scientific consensus existed in the 1970s on “global cooling,” which he portrays as a scare concocted by scientists “in order to generate funds for their pet projects.” Such antiscience sentiment, however, is not merely shut away in these committees. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher once suggested a ploy to cut greenhouse gas emissions by “subsidizing the clearing of rainforests.”

At the heart of such outspoken dribble is a fundamental disregard for the integrity of science. In the minds of such politicians, scientific beliefs do not turn on the weight of evidence, but on the clang of their coffers. It is not the search for knowledge that motivates the scientific process, but rather the aggrandizement of ivory tower charlatans. Amidst the clamor on Capitol Hill, science is merely another “lobby” vying for limited funds.

Law and Science according to the cq roll call guide to the New Congress, law is the primary professional background of Senators today, followed by public service or politics, and then business or the corporate field. There is little doubt that the nine scientists in our government must strain for a voice amidst the clamor of two hundred lawyers. Although bolstered by the 32 medical professionals on Capitol Hill, the American government is markedly non-scientific. Congress is essentially a courtroom, and judging from the recent sequestration, science is not of the utmost priority.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, criticized this political polarization of law. Tyson asks, “What happens in the courtroom? It doesn’t go to what’s right, it goes to who argues best…and Congress is half that profession.” As Tyson notes, “the act of arguing, and not agreeing, seems to be fundamental to that profession.” The law thus depends primarily on rhetoric, the idea that amidst a slew of opposing arguments the truth will somehow emerge.

This approach is quite opposed to the scientific method.

Scientific findings are only deemed worthy with exacting protocol, rigorous testing, and and extensive peer reviews.

And even then, publication invites criticism that spurs further research. Congress, however, is a body of 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. In the chambers of government, any opinion, no matter how vitriolic or uninformed, is given a platform. If we consider our ever-changing and technologically sophisticated world, the United States can unquestionably benefit from the participation and example of more scientists in government, regardless of political affiliation.

In the creation of the Federal Reserve, Congress once acted to shield our monetary policy from the tyranny of political rhetoric and gain. It may be time to adapt the same model for scientific issues.

Our policy still suffers from political equivocation in place of scientific truth, scientific illiteracy masquerading as insight. Yet it is not the outspoken blunders of Todd Akin and George Broun that endanger our national interests, but the quiet assent that allows our elected officials to disenfranchise the scientific enterprise in America. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson asserts, “Science is distrusted not because of what it can do, but because people don’t understand how it does what it can do.” Perhaps we can start with our elected officials.

JOHN AURELIO B’14 is globally cool.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

When We Wander Onscreen As Ourselves A Talk with Chris Gethard

by Emma Miller Illustration by Lizzie Davis Chris Gethard is a mainstay at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. His anti-talk show, The Chris Gethard Show, began on the UCBT stage in 2009 and moved to Manhattan Public Access in 2011. While the theme of each episode changes drastically from week to week, a typical show will involve viewer call-ins, tazing, and some sort of emotional catharsis. We talked about positivity, failure, and the Cult of Gethard.

The College Hill Independent: You’re from an improv background—how has working with UCB people on The Chris Gethard Show informed your decision not to plan the end of each show?

Chris Gethard: Even though the public access show is an hour, the most planned shows are still only about 75 percent, and those are the ones that we really sit down beforehand and know the most about what’s going to happen. Because everybody is from an improv background—the people on camera, the people in the control room, the writers of the show—I think we all feel that it works best for us not to be locked down. One of the things we’ve discovered with our show is that callers can call up and affect things so much, the microphones can break because the studio’s unreliable, but pretty early on we realized those things were some of the best moments. The unexpected stuff plays to our history and strengths as improvisers. Setting a goal of “A, B, and C will happen” and then A, B, and C happens is a very good thing, but I think it’s more interesting and risky and ultimately funnier if it’s A, B, and C will happen and the D, E, and F we’ll figure out along the way. To me, that’s the next step; I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think that’s part of what the audience likes.

Indy: The audience has a lot of power on the show and represents a larger following that’s become a real community— what role do you play in that cult?

CG: Well, I feel like I’m sort of a curator of that community.

The Gethard Show evolved from its earliest intention of making it a parody of a late night talk show at the UCB Theatre, and it quickly turned into something else at UCB. Public Access has changed that more and more. You know it’s a comedy show, but it’s also a strange art project in its own right. I think a lot of that is the community that we’ve built up via the Internet, and I do feel like it’s my job to challenge that community and to curate it, and to set the tone of what it is through helping find its interactions that I think are positive and lead to humor and creativity. I really like it. I really like designing shows that use the community as well. They are obsessive.

One of my favorite shows was where audience members could

MARCH 22 2013

submit characters for the show, and we were going to try to find new recurring characters that were fictional because we didn’t have enough of them. We invited people to submit names of characters, but they couldn’t describe anything about them. We were getting all these names and then our writers took those names and came up with basic premises, then gave those basic premises to different improvisers of New York. The basic premises we gave to actors who were improvisers and they filled out the rest, and by the end of the show you could be a kid in Ohio who turned in some random name, and you might see what happens when it shows up on your computer screen later that week. To me, that’s a pretty amazing thing that we get to do now, and I don’t think enough people are doing stuff like that. I’m glad to be one of the early experimenters with it, but none of it would work if we didn’t have a community that cared about the show and what it is.

Indy: I think that because of your role in the show, it is easy for people to think you are the persona you play on the show.

What is the line between you, Chris Gethard, and Chris Gethard as curator and host?

CG: That’s a really good question and a very astute thing that a lot of people don’t realize, which is that I’m Chris Gethard and I host the show, but on the show all those characters have amplified aspects. Shannon comes off as this tough, intimidating person, and she has that side to her, but she’s also a really sweet person. It’s just the show’s medium bringing that to the surface hard core. Murf comes off as this badass wild man, and he has that side to him, but he’s also a really loving guy in a committed relationship who also loves his friends. I think that the characters on the show are us, and I’m that guy that you see, but I have a more well-rounded life than the show presents. That’s an hour of my week with the camera pointed me and an adrenaline rush in a specific environment. It’s a very interesting thing in how people read my book and sense that I’m an honest person, and I am, in my work, but it’s still not my whole life. I remember I actually once got in a fight with my brother where I said something on the show that was nasty to a caller because the caller said something nasty to Shannon and I went off on the guy. My brother was like, “You’ve gotta be careful, man, because you’re supposed to be the nicest comedian in the world,” and I was like, “Well, I’m not that, I’m not.” I mean, maybe in certain instances I’ve been seen that way, and that’s a very nice thing and I’m glad I’m a nice enough person to get that going. But, I’m also the dude where if you mess with my friends, I’m gonna yell at you. If you say something mean to someone I care about, I’m gonna go back at you. I think that was an instance where a part of my life that usually doesn’t show up on TV showed up

on screen and was kind of jarring to my own brother. Yeah, it’s a very strange line we walk being that we wander on screen as ourselves, but those are characters. Those are people who have 23 other hours in their day and six more days in their week.

The hour you see them on the show, as much as we do connect with our fans, is still entertainment. It’s still comedy, and it’s been very trippy to deal with that and see how it turns out.

Indy: How would you define your relationship to positivity?

“Loser is the new nerd” is kind of the mantra of the show, but does that mean being positive about failures or being satisfied with no success?

CG: I think the whole thing started because a lot of people were wearing non-prescription glasses, and to me it’s funny that all of a sudden you can wear a sweater and a bowtie and that’s a very hip thing. You’re in a certain class of kid if you’re left thinking, “Well, now what do I have,” and so I call myself a loser and encourage other people who feel like losers to feel okay with it. One of the things that I always say to people when I teach improv and respond to people who ask for comedy advice is that you have to get good at failing. Failure is very much a skill, and I think the whole idea of “loser is the new nerd” extends that to life in general, rather than limiting it to artistic pursuits. I think a lot of people have connected with that idea because it allows you to stop apologizing for being someone who fucks up and doesn’t necessarily have positive moments all the time. I think you can release a lot of pressure in your life if you do sort of say that it’s not easy for anybody. You asked what my relationship to positivity is, and at this point in my life I’m a pretty positive person, but there’s a real chip on my shoulder about getting there. There’s been a lot of anger in my early life that led me to being a very positive person. I had to fight through a lot of negative stuff and a lot of anger and feelings of bitterness and managed to let that go, and I’ve become a pretty happy guy with a pretty good outlook on things. I think that whole side of the show is encouraging people younger than me to drop the negative side of it and just embrace it. Everything good that’s ever happened to me, every girl who’s ever liked me, every professional success I’ve had has been rooted in the things I used to be ashamed of. Everything bad has made me work harder towards bigger goals, and it was the flaws that wound up paying off. It was the things I used to want to hide about myself that became the things people embraced about me, and I think that’s a pretty positive thing to put out there.

INTERVIEWS

14

Mourning

by Robert Sandler i’ve found bits of everyone in you. There is no more grass in my yard, only clover. Found a way through fields one day and fell. No one lifted me and I lay there heaving.

When foggy air brought a bat to my room I captured him naked. In the rain when Zampanò said “he cannot slaughter that tiny sliver of space,” the foxes were screaming. My grandfather cut my great grandmother down from the vaulted garage ceiling. My mother is sweeping onion skins off the counter. These narratives need complication, a string of beacons from rooftop to rooftop.

The morning complicates, half light for a half-wit. I am running across the vacant lots. The children next-door had a burial for their cat. Sabine, at six years old, wore all black. This was the nerve of wandering or the recognition of a currant, pesticide over pitted skin, tongue to protection. Even in a reverie bound by strong cords, shadows serve as proper mirrors. Reflection as gain and lack, nuance in the feathered edges. Shadows change in color or surfaces change in the light. These are tell tale signs, swim with me forever, do not once rise for breath: Expansions draw upon muscle memory; the swing set cast in shadow from the vantage of my room These are dangerous claims to make, any sort of infinite or positive. I speak of the future in a graspless fashion for fear of ever being right.

Sitting across from bare legs, the thumb crevassing your thighs flashed a penis.

I do not know how to feel precious things as my ligaments are mismatched armatures. A wooden dolls with tines for hands, pinch - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - pinch.

We watched simplified gestures in the same room, rows apart. Thick sluttish legs, legs like cassiopeia, waiting for you. I am a vacant face in the corner my funny ginger nymphet. You live above a sandwich shop and overcook eggs. I am wary, walking in the rain has often driven this tight lipped feeling from me.

There is this ritual of grabbing which makes me feel used and feminine. I waggle for it, the almond butter, the plainness. You move my thighs when I watch pink yarn from the window.

Porcelain nails against my skin. Filaments of cherubic chuckles (the clatter is symphonic in the morning light.) Tile to tile of ecstasy while I await to wash your patterned back, a morose likening of dew. “Marry me.”

I plucked a flower from your dearest friend. I did not mean to, my fingers are so rarely still, so rarely spare.

Bother is used indeterminately, flanking my sides with beaded cowlicks and a cobweb. It has snapped all desire from me. In fact, I ache in absolution.

Walls apart they chuckle, I am veiled in slight plum and tangent grays. Beseech me to wonder and I will cry­—fain not.

I veiled myself in mop and you in rotary scrubber and we were terrifying.

I have yet to retreat from your cause, it would be too pleasant if I had to run. My shoulder could not bare to move me. A shudder to shift, blatantly tired, fatigue awash.

My mother took me here when I was so young. I did not know the difference between transitive’s and thought the pool a vibrant mirror.

When you entered space a loss created an anxiety.

The world is seldom of its own accord. It is small flower filtering.

Remember deeply, in certain, in backyard lore, the toothy one rules all.

If it is true we cannot die. In certain, the overlap of valleys deepens a depth.

Only this is the exact temperature as the host of other times.

Now the sounds are at my throat, slowly working their way towards and infinite signals and winds.

There is a lofty bean on your arm which I gave you. You took two vicodin and we drew permanent signs.

The sweet summer air of Baltimore is licking the mildew of your fishtank.

Wax and bark have tattered edges in the sunlight.

15

FEATURES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The End ( a n a g e n d a ) Alessandro De Francesco Translated from Italian by Belle Cushing

tell me how i could tell you that in those days i wasn’t there that the tape was turning in vain and a bend was nesting under the covers we brandished the telephone remember we stopped looking at each activation of word in the darkness i see a portion of the river in motion illuminated by the signs and streetlamps makes little twisters flows in all directions somewhere else i was stretched out on the ground emitting incomprehensible wails after she left i took the elevator it banged gently against the sides kept going down even after the 0 floor blinked i wonder if it had kept going what would have happened would i maybe have rediscovered the toy car lost in another city while i pushed back childhood into the grass consciousness will not be granted we inject ourselves with sequence shots shooting a film already been cut in others’ bodies cutting into a curdled emulsion

MARCH 22 2013

sometimes the pain appears as an illegible presence a bottomless surface at this point i would be framed from above standing before you in the half-light alone in cross-section behind the shutters in the grass alone standing before you you were observed by a form in the window of the building opposite it was a bag atop a wardrobe that to us was the face of a woman lying in the dark in the bed of another city i saw on the backs of my eyelids a neck stretched out of proportion and on top an alien face with no expression

every concept was shaken like a tree in the dark there were openings in the summer everything was red everything calm our film would be titled on going home it would be unraveled on infinite planes and as leading actors departure zones a lampshade its plug stuck in the grass and the letters of my name written on the pages of your agenda but at one single sentence look i have to go to know i am real things became distanced the pear’s porous skin did not hold

(and so it had to be)

in the glass table i watch the clouds reflected upside down city skies still glow even at night but in a non-euclidean geometry in a curvilinear space you would and would not be here with me our hands would meet in a room without eyes the words would appear framed in a close up to tell us finally with clarity when we got lost

LITERARY

16

(Some) Figures of the Animal at Home

by Maggie Milner Ilustration by Olivia Kates

their names were the names of heroines from the stories my mother told me in bed. She read to me every night until I was thirteen—the year, not incidentally, of my first tongue kiss. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mother Goose, L.M. Montgomery, then Louisa May Alcott, Conan Doyle, Austen. The women were all Emilys or Roses or Elizabeths or Marys. Those became the names of my sisters.

My half-brother was en route to Northwestern the day they were christened.

My dad drove with his first wife across the country in an old green van and left their son in Evanston. My mom’s son had already been in college three years, and I was an only child for the first time, alone with my mother and father in a five-room house in the middle of the woods, which is still the only home I have to return to. I don’t know what makes you feign a family for yourself: desperation or unspent love or just generative solitude. Whatever it is, I woke one day with sisters.

They were all different. Emily was my foil: bossy and demanding, we argued over stuffed bears and bowls of pastina. Sarah was shy and deferent. Mary mostly stayed down by the stream hunting fossil rocks and red efts and didn’t come to dinner much. Rosie was pretty and conniving. They were my disciples, my flock, a bunch of girls about my age with no authority over what I ate for breakfast or how gently I scratched on the ears of my cat. They were lost boys and I was Wendy, standing in for their mother in a fort made of treebark and pine boughs.

They loved me.

It’s hard to remember, by now, the games we played by the beaver pond and in the closet that was my first bedroom. I have vivid memories of their deaths, though: Mary’s dive off an overpass, Sarah’s drowning in the swimming hole, Emily’s side impact collision with a horse trailer. In bed after a story, my mother asked me where they’d gone. “Rosie was murdered,” I said. “I don’t know who did it.” * mickey showed up one day when i was three, looking through the window at us from a church pew my parents kept on the front porch. He was bright orange with tabby stripes that made an M-shape on his forehead, which my mother used to say stood for “Maggie,” and which meant he was mine. We let him in and put a plate of tuna on the floor. He stayed with us nine years.

It wasn’t the first time a cat had adopted us. Roy was a brown shorthair who appeared in the garage, which was so crowded with old bikes and bed-frames that a car couldn’t fit in it. He wove like smoke through the stepladders and sheets of drywall until we finally caught him and brought him in the house. He died a few days later by the couch.

There was Wendell who arrived in the backyard, and Mavis who my mother carried home from down the road. Wendell disappeared after a while, and Mavis was diagnosed with feline AIDS and put to sleep. But Mickey stayed happily on, with the sagging paunch that neuters get, the flattish face, the tendency to curl up

17

LITERARY

in the closet on the shoes.

We still say he was the sweetest animal we ever knew. Days after he’d gone missing, when Bonnie Craig called to say she’d smelled something rotten on her morning walk, my parents wouldn’t let me go with them to see.

My mother came back to the house alone to get me, and we walked back together to the place my father buried him. He’d been run over near an apple tree half a mile away.

Since then, my father’s parents have both died; my brothers have gotten married; one has a baby on the way. Still, I haven’t seen my father cry like that since, on his knees on the fresh earth, the shovel beside him, apple tree moving overhead. * this is nonfiction, meaning true, meaning not a dream. Though I guess dreams of flying change your sense of the sky when you wake. I’ve never dreamt of flying, only driving.

The month Grandpa David first moved into the nursing home, Jamie Lundecker knocked on our door. I was building a stable for my plastic animals out of blocks on the living room rug. Young enough to still hide behind my mother’s legs when speaking to grownups, I was scared to follow Jamie alone across the road.

The Lundeckers had lived across the road since my parents bought the property in the ‘80s, and always interacted with my family purely perfunctorily. Madge and Jamie were the kind of fences-make-good-neighbors neighbors, formal and distant, whose old age had made them craggier, recalcitrant.

When Jamie died, Madge sold the house, its orchards, footbridge, cemetery full of dead Waldorfs and Sissums. When new neighbors moved into the house, they found the lawn littered with empty cartridges, the barn cluttered with pails of lead paint and ammo, a family of polystyrene deer riddled by gunfire that Jamie had used for target practice. A picture of Kennedy with bullet-holes through his chest and face. A sooty circle where his forehead had been.

It must take something extraordinary to forge a memory at that age, a kind of novel knowledge that the mind takes hold of as a lesson. I remember it though: how he led me down the long driveway to his house, veering off before the barn into a field. The grass was high and sun-singed by late summer, and I waded through it in the wake he left. Halfway in, he put his finger to his lips and pointed to a patch of flattened grass. The fawn was still wet, tremulous and fearful of wind. Fresh from its mother, it was folded the way it had been in the womb, legs buckled bonelessly beneath it, eyes still sealed.

The doe, sensing us, was off in the woods. We watched it breathe for a while, then he took me home.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The List

March 22-April 4 FRIDAY MARCH 22

TUESDAY APRIL 2

swamp rising // jla collective, 1950 westminster st., providence Force-Fed Drugs, Power Masters, some noise dude called Slunk Heaven, and the Indy’s very own Playground Jerks. Donation @ the door.

10PM.

when ink eats paper // john carter brown library, 94 george st. providence A conversation about conservation. The library’s curator of maps and a conservator will talk about writing inks, implements, and William Hack’s 17th Century Manuscript Atlas. Free. 5:30PM.

SATURDAY MARCH 23

how artists change cities // careerlab, 167 angell st., brown university A talk with the minds behind city fixtures like AS220, 186 Carpenter, The Steelyard and WaterFire. Invaluable for students interested in the arts, art entrepreneurship, and how artists can change cities.

h.p. lovecraft // john brown house, 52 power street, providence Annual walking tour to commemorate the death of H.P. Lovecraft. $10. 11AM. mapping incarceration // studio 1, the granoff center, brown university Imagining another future: a panel discussion.

Free. 10:30AM.

TUESDAY MARCH 26 the barefoot contessa // providence performing arts center, 220 weybosset st., providence Ina Garten shares her natural approach to cooking. Tips, stories, recipes, plus an interactive Q&A with the audience moderated by Al Forno’s chief chef. $35-55. 7:30PM.

SUNDAY MARCH 31 open studio // risd museum, 20 north main street, providence Art en masse: making multiples. Make your own. All materials provided! Free. 1-3PM.

MONDAY APRIL 1 selling products on the internet // providence public library, 150 empire st., providence A free class with tips on how to best utilize Etsy, ebay, Shopify, Wasala, Stripe, PayPal, and Google Checkout. 12PM.

eek in this w ry liste India Delhi, 1739 - h steals the Sha Nadir ls of the jewe ne. k Thro Peacoc

WEDNESDAY APRIL 3 the two faces of subjective uncertainty // metcalf 101, friedman auditorium, brown university To be discussed: intuition, types of uncertainty, overconfidence. A talk with UCLA Professor of Psychology Craig R. Fox. 4PM.

THURSDAY APRIL 4 comic book workshop // south providence community library, 441 prairie avenue, providence Learn new ways to draw and make comics.

Develop skills as an author, use ink and tools.

Free! 4-6PM. straight white men // leeds theatre, lyman hall, brown university A play exploring how straight white men react as their once-unchallenged cultural predominance begins to erode. Written and Directed by Young Jean Lee. Students $7, Adults $15. 8-10PM. in the know?

e.g. how to make glitter jar candles? email listtheindy@gmail.com @list_easy