The College Hill Independent — Vol. 45 Issue 2

This Issue

Nora Mathews Alisa Caira

Sacha Sloan

Laura David

Kathy Wang

Evan Donnachie

From the Editors

Corinne Leong Sacha Sloan Jane Wang

WEEK

Masha Breeze

Nora Mathews

ARTS Cecilia LolaAnabelleBarronJohnstonSimon

EPHEMERA

Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen

FEATURES

Zachary Braner Ryan JennaChuangCooley

LITERARY

Alyscia Batista

Madeline Canfield

Tierra Sherlock

METRO Jack NélariDoughtyFigueroa Torres Rose NicholasHougletMiller

SCIENCE + TECH Justin Scheer Ella KatherineSpungenXiong

WORLD Priyanka Mahat Alissa Simon X Lucia MaximeSeoyoungKan-SperlingKimPitchon

DEAR INDY Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD

Sofia Barnett Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Alisa Caira Sage PederDebIsaacAnabelleJenningsJohnstonMcKennaMariniSchaefer

STAFF WRITERS

Hanna JonathanSarahKeelinMarianaDanielleEmmaLauraSwetabhLilyMarkGracielaMaruMadeleineAboueidAdrianceAttwoodBatistaBuckleyChahineChangkakotiDavidEatonEmersonFajnzylberGaughanGoldmanGreen

Faith Griffiths

Eric CharlotteGuo Haq Anushka Kataruka Roza

JustinKathy/SiqiJuliaAlexKolyaCallieAlexCharlieSarahMorganKaraCameronNicoleKavakKoneckeLeoMcAndrewMcCordickMcGrathMedeirosPurdyRabinovitzShieldsValentiVazWangWoo

COPY CHIEF Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS FACT-CHECKERS/ Ava JeanGraceEleanorShravyaEverestAngelinaRebeccaJasmineAlaraRahmlaDorenAidanZoeyKlaraMackDunQiaoyingBradleyChenJianChinFordDavidson-SchmichGrantHarbisonHsiao-WeckslerJonesKalfazadeLiMartin-WelpRios-GalindoMaya-TudorSompalliPetersSamahaWanlass

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Klara AyçaAlexBritneyDavidson-SchmichDeLeonNadirashviliÜlgen

DESIGN Brinkhuis Lim Tao Floria

EDITORSILLUSTRATION

ILLUSTRATORS Bartusek

ElisaKellyJaneIrisLiviaIzzySophiaHannahSaroshLucyJoshuaHaimengSophieLillyanneNicholasJuliaClaireAshleyBassmanCastañedaChasseChengEdwardsFisherFoulkesGeKoolikLebowitzNadeemParkPattiRoth-DishyWeinerWrightZhouZhouKim

COORDINATORSDEVELOPMENT

Mission Statement

The CollegeHillIndependent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Bicycle wheels come moments of desolation, we are often forced to confront an odd number, eat our ninth pretzel, and bury the extra Ikea screw for our 4-drawer Malm dresser in the yard. Lucky for you that this is Issue

Week in Putting Yourself Out There

socially. You may be asking yourself: Where do I meet people with the same values as me (other heiresses and debutantes with ugly dogs that give us an air of quirkiness)? Why don’t I have someone to pass notes with in class? When everyone looks at me, can they tell I can’t make baseball hats work? All this uncertainty can make it hard to focus on what really mat ters, like commenting on sponsored Instagram posts or organizing a carpool to your little cous in’s dance recital (your aunt will not communi cate about when her tennis lesson ends!). Well, worry no longer: through endless trial and error, we’ve developed a fail-safe, step-by-step guide to win the hearts of any potential new friends.

1. Try telling stories! Friends want to be en tertained. It helps to have a compelling family history to draw from (three uncles struck by lightning), but if that doesn’t work, you can describe an episode of “The Simpsons” in full detail, frame by frame. Make timeless memories as you divulge the most intimate details of your dreams about your blossoming relation ship with Australian-accent Siri, or captivate your audience with a shot-for-shot descrip tion of Flanders family dinner.

2. Learn to communicate in a playful way! Texts are overdone: use your hair to spell cryptic messages in the shower. Your roommates are some of the most convenient candidates for potential best friends, but they’re waiting for you to offer to pick up Dunkin’ through hair numerology. Nobody wants to be told to “EMPTY THE DISH WASHER NOW” through a boring old iMessage! Those clumps of hair are the perfect medium for a portrait of a prospering bacterial ecosystem dying a painful and horrific death because someone decided they needed to wash a cereal bowl.

evil forces conspiring against you and make them fight in the arena of death! You can invite everyone from your driver’s ed class and serve

4.crudité.Stayon

top of the trends! It’s important to be relatable but unique: as Week in Review editors, we’re anticipating that straight marriage and scene bangs are going to be huge this year. Plan accordingly!

other and set up an office that demands so much of your time your wife starts to won der whether you’re choosing the work over her. You are, and she needs to stop asking! You and your new friend will be closer in no time.

TEXT NORA MATHEWS ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY DESIGN TANYA

If One is Silver and the Other’s Gold, Honey, I Want a Diamond!

I was in the Garden today. The Earth turned over under particular knives. For the first time in the season, the air sat hot. My nose sprouted with scents of sweat and dirt.

I dug out weeds with my hands because fingers are more effective than metal. Thoughts composted—how odd it was to uproot, to try again when the Earth had already worked quite hard. I told myself I was uprooting to plant again, to make a Garden. A space that silences the squirming things within me and plants their lessons in the dirt. This is why I need earthworms and dead leaves, food scraps and stains on the white T-shirt I shouldn’t have worn.

Dirt rains like snow in a Garden. Dirt becomes playful like sand when you remove the roots holding it together. I am building the sandcastles I never fully realized, replicating their moats.

In this play, there are earthworms inhabiting my castles. Knives try to avoid them. My hands try to refuse their kiss. We fail together.

Don’t worms have nine lives? My brother asks. No, they have many hearts. I reply.

Worms squirm away, and worms are severed by my work. Dying or living with many hearts still.

He takes them on the flat side of his shovel and moves them away from our disruption. He hopes they will stay and tend to the Garden, to be filled with plants we picked up yesterday at Walmart. They’re more likely to tend to this dirt when left alone.

In the crook of my elbow, a worm breaks the skin. I leave it, and it burrows back into my veins. There are already too many circles left by every worm I have tried to pull out too urgently. I sit still as my muscles make room for their pathways, which seem more organic in my body than my own.

I need to start a Garden because of what I stole from other ones. Flattened grasses, stomped-on ants, dried up worms left as consequence of too much feeling.

I remember when Summers were still Springs, and the pavement was moist with midnight rains. Sitting then in a season past, I sat and watched as the worms crawled over damp cement. They slipped into my blisters. I welcomed them home. There is work to be done, I thought. Worm work of shifting the matter within me and sliding forward still. The worms hide now, afraid of me and my prying shovels. They hide in my veins, find ing each space between my organs until there is nowhere else to go.

Fishbowl song first sung young. I was six and the moment had just started breathing. Still, heartbreak came fast. The fish I brought home from St. Mary’s Carnival died a few days after Fishbowl’s first breath. I was a winner (in the ring toss). The fish, I suppose, was not as skilled, or maybe not as lucky, or maybe not as obsessed with games that are meant to leave you only with losses. Maybe heartloss is more accurate than heartbreak. A fishbowl with no fish is empty, even if there is still water in it.

Fishbowl song sung again without warning. Hum crawled up throat to make routine, ask questions. Tommy was a friend, and then he was a friend with a fish. Really, he was the first to make a choice that meant, I can keep this thing alive, in this new place where I must also keep myself alive. Fishbowl sat on top of Tommy’s speaker, and the fishy bass made its fishy heart beat to the rhythm. When winter came, I drove Tommy’s fish to Boston in a soda cup with Fishbowl in a suitcase.

The Charles River froze over before I gained a second heart. As January began, a second soda cup and the same suitcase went to the home-that-was-not-yet-home. Tommy never came back to the not-yet-home, never dug in his heels to assert that the world we were building could be one that lasted. His fish became my sec ond heart only when I texted him to ask about it. That is, when he said it was mine. And it was after, when people-who-were-not-him removed all of his things from his room. A room without someone you know is empty. That fish died a year later, floating to the top of all it had known. And I became heartloss as winter thawed and home was home (deeply, this time). I became heartless because the bass of Tommy’s room had stopped beating and a fish had died. Hearts I had cared for had stopped thumping.

Fishbowl song is still singing. Fishbowl sits dirty on my kitchen table with a new fish I bought working at the pet store. I picked him out thinking he was the prettiest. I know now that he is ugly, and I see him only through Fishbowl grime. That is how hearts work. A fishbowl makes everything in it distorted. The roundness changes the gaze. The water muddies if you don’t change it often. The fish swims in circles, and never asks, never wants, always stays even when it’s gone.

When this fish dies, I will find a new fish, and a new fish, and a new—

ALISA CAIRA B’22.5 is neither a fish nor a worm. son hymns.

FEFFORTUNIONIZATIONSTARBUCKSWARWICKALTERS

One vote. At this Starbucks chain in Warwick, Rhode Island, the impossible suddenly seemed possible: by one ballot, the store had voted in favor of forming a union. There were still two outstanding votes, but if the tally held, the coffeehouse at 25 Pace Boulevard, Warwick would become the first unionized Starbucks in the state.Against the backdrop of a nationwide union wave among Starbucks workers—led by the national organizing campaign Starbucks Work ers United, which facilitated the Pace Boulevard union effort—a victory in Warwick could have reshaped the labor landscape of the Ocean State. Rhode Island would have emerged as another front in the turbulent, ever-expanding battle against Starbucks for the rights of its ‘partners,’ as Starbucks ironically refers to its employees. What went wrong?

+++

Last April, Cassie Burke, a worker at the Pace Boulevard location, spearheaded the petition to unionize her store along with several coworkers as part of this national wave, the College Hill Independent reported at the time. “There was … a lot of support from Workers United, the group we are unionizing with,” Burke previously told the Indy. “Workers United actually makes the process incredibly, incredibly easy—it’s far sim pler than I thought it would be.”

In their April letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, the Warwick Starbucks work ers emphasized the national resonance of their effort. The company’s union-busting elsewhere in the U.S. “lies at the heart of our reason for unionizing,” they wrote, explicitly highlighting the “blatant retaliation from corporate” that union-hopeful Starbucks staff faced in Memphis and Buffalo. “In your response to the union ization of other stores, you’ve shown that this is not a fear without backing,” they wrote to Schultz.

+++

After the election, which took place via mail in May, Burke and her fellow pro-union co workers seemed on the cusp of victory. But the process wasn’t over yet. Of the 18 ballots cast, two remained unopened because the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) contested their inclusion in the final result, according to a July 1 order released on the agency’s website. In the order, Laura A. Sacks, the NLRB regional direc tor responsible for Rhode Island, wrote that the

challenged ballots “raise substantial and mate rial issues of fact” and should “be resolved by hearing.”According to the order, Workers United maintained that the caster of one ballot was not on the eligibility list, which Starbucks lawyers conceded while nonetheless pushing for the vote’s inclusion. The second contested ballot, Workers United argued, bore an “illegible mark in the space provided for signature”—Starbucks countered by saying the ballot envelope “clearly has an intentional marking on the flap of the outerSo,envelope.”throughout June and July, the result was up in the air. Sacks ordered an official NLRB hearing on the two ballots to be held on July 22. The uncertainty was “overwhelming and a little anxiety-inducing,” Jennifer Maynard, a prounion shift supervisor, told the Providence Journal in

mid-June.Maynard’s

anxiety was not unwarranted. As the NLRB process dragged on, Starbucks was amping up its union-busting efforts across the country. The coffeehouse behemoth has fired dozens of union leaders in the past year, accord ing to Workers United. A federal judge recently ordered the company to rehire seven unionizing baristas. In mid-August, Starbucks lashed out at the NLRB in an attempt to coerce the agency into halting union elections at its stores. Later that month, the NLRB filed a complaint against the company for withholding pay raises from unionizing workers. The agency even sought to force Schultz to read a statement to his employ ees about their rights.

But despite the best efforts of Starbucks and its union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson, over 220 Starbucks stores have successfully unionized in the past +++year.

Back in Warwick, when the dust had settled,

there was a new final tally: 9-9, a tie, meaning that the store had failed to unionize. One of the two contested votes, which ended up being against unionization, was counted, while the other was discarded, according to the NLRB website. (The NLRB has not released more de tailed information on the deliberations.)

“We know Starbucks is willing to lie to people, and we’re just going to have to try and combat that,” Burke told the Indy last April. “Any company that is willing to fire someone to prevent unionization is a company that needs a union.”AsStarbucks’ illegal tactics face mounting scrutiny from the public and the federal govern ment alike, even the company’s investors are raising their eyebrows. On Monday, a group of public and private investors filed a shareholder proposal calling on Starbucks to enlist an “inde pendent, third-party assessment” to investigate

Starbucks’ “stated commitment” to fair labor conditions. The proposal highlighted worker reports of “retaliation, intimidation, firings, cap tive audience meetings, store closings, undue surveillance, and illegally excluding unionized employees from wage and benefit increases” at the hands of Starbucks.

“I devoted myself solely to this for months, and to see it so narrowly escape from us was truthfully heartbreaking,” Burke wrote in a Twitter post after the news broke.

But she also cautioned against fatalism in response to the loss. “To those who were look ing to us to see if you want to organize in your store, our loss does not detract from the colos sal impact of the over … 200 unionized stores,” Burke said on Twitter. “Even in our case, our loss was only by a hair. You can do it. And it’s worth it.”

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 thinks should tip your local Starbucks

BEYOND NEWSROOMTHE

A conversation with Steve Ahlquist

“Editorial freedom comes not simply in the final decisions of what stories to run and which to hold, but in the pursuit of those stories themselves.”

T he outlook for local news isn’t promising, as research and policy institutions, think tanks, and larger media outlets have repeatedly pointed out over the last few decades. News deserts, defined as areas with limited access to quality community journalism and reporting (often meaning few or no local news outlets, particularly in print), are growing across the country, leaving destructive effects on democracy in their wake.

My personal introduction to this phenom enon came in 2021, when I stumbled upon an issue of the Washington Post Magazine that opened with the headline “Since 2005, 2,200 local newspapers across America have closed.” Relying on data from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the issue outlined the real danger posed to democratic institutions by the demise of local news. The Northeast

corridor fares well in the Post’s headcount of operating daily papers per county— unsurprising, given the area’s population density and wealth; yet, judging the quality of the local reporting that remains is another story.Providence’s reporting landscape, for example, is dominated by the Providence Journal, a handful of Boston Globe reporters dispatched to the Providence bureau, and WPRI 12. While it’s better than having no news organizations dedicated to serving the area at all, the priorities of these outlets are usually the ‘higher profile’ goings-on at city or state legislatures, not the grassroots organizing of marginalized commu nities or emerging issues in Rhode Island’s smaller“Whentowns.Iwas younger, there used to be a Journal reporter for every town in the state,” says Steve Ahlquist, founder of local independent progressive news outlet Uprise Rhode Island, in an interview with the College Hill Independent. “So, there would be, for example, a group of reporters

with an office in Westerly, covering all of the events there. Now, if I look at the Journal and try to find a story about Westerly, I pretty much can’t.”“It’s not that I’m anti-mainstream media,” he continues, “I just think that, oftentimes, the companies that own them want a story that is part of the status quo, and if you upset the status quo too much, they’re not interested. Many of the people I interview might have very different ideas about race, economics, or the distribution of wealth. And some of that threatens people who are the corporate owners of this type of media.”

A former comic book writer, Ahlquist has become one of the most prominent figures in Providence journalism and activist circles. Under his direction, Uprise has gathered something of a cult following, and Ahlquist himself hopes to lend his resources and platform to communities invisibilized by mainstream news discourses.

“The real deal is this,” Ahlquist says, switching from his usual excited tone to a more somber one, “check your privilege, show up, be quiet, listen, quote people accurately, and try to under stand their point of view.”

His approach to reporting is simple: if he’s in a room with his peers from the major outlets, he feels he’s in the wrong place. “If the governor puts on a press release, all the major news outlets show up. But if a small group like D.A.R.E holds a protest for affordable housing, I’m very often the only reporter there.” As he tells me, he’d rather spend his time driving across the state to the various protests taking place on any given day than waste an afternoon at what is, effectively, a hollow ribbon-cutting ceremony. That’s not, he feels, what the people of Rhode Island need to know nor the founding purpose of Uprise

A philosopher by training, Ahlquist had floated between various roles before he landed on journalism. When he finally made the tran sition, it was because he saw a gap in modern reporting: “When you think about what modern journalism is, they talk about things like neutrality and just giving you ‘the facts.’ I don’t believe that facts exist in a vacuum. There’s always context. And when you read about the history of journalists—people like Ida B. Wells or Upton Sinclair—they understand that. They’re somewhere between journalists and novelists. When you read about these people, they’re not just delivering raw facts, but have a point of view they’re trying to express.”

His writing career started with that ethos in mind, publishing the occasional op-ed for the Providence Journal full time for the progressive blog Future. It was there, under the guidance of editor Bob Plain, that Ahlquist received an immersive training in the processes and practices of jour nalism. “I learned the basics of how to best ask questions, how to get your question through when you’re in a room of reporters and everyone is talking over you trying to get a soundbite for their piece,” he explains. But after enough time under the supervision of others, Ahlquist began to develop his own ideas on the direction he wanted his reporting to take—ideas that, at times, conflicted with those of his superiors. So, he set out on his own, starting an outlet that, in technical terms, could be qual ified as a ‘movement journalism’ publication, focusing mainly on the state’s progressive causes and grassroots groups. He started by purchasing a cheap domain to give his writing a place to live for the first few weeks, and then migrated the content to a more professional blog. For a while, Ahlquist essentially did it all—reporting, website maintenance, fundraising, photo and video editing. “I’d say I spend 60 to 80 hours a week working,” Ahlquist recalls. Between trips to the General Assembly to keep an eye on Rhode Island politics and attending various events around the state, his days fill up quickly. “I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when I don’t write for except for maybe Easter.”

Over the last few years, he’s been able to bring on a few team members who can help ease the burden. And though the logistical challenge of running Uprise is still large, with their help, Ahlquist has more

free time to spend on the road at events and talking to Rhode Islanders. Building these rela tionships with those he writes about has been paramount to both his success as a writer and Uprise’s success as an outlet.

Remembering one instance from around a decade ago, Ahlquist told the Indy about covering a group of Spanish-speaking hotel workers in Providence who were lobbying for a wage increase: “Because I was the only reporter showing up at their little events half the time, they were happy to translate what was going on in real time for me because they wanted to get their message out through my camera.” In another instance, Ahlquist remembers being the first call of a family whose three-year-old had been pepper-sprayed by the police. He was the only one in the room as her mother shared her

“‘Local news is what covers those goings on— things that truly affect everyday people’s lives. When there is local news coverage, that arms folks and empowers them with the ability to participate in the governance of their community.’”

story on the record. “People call me to report on their stories because I know the commu nity, and I’ve managed to earn that trust after years of reporting,” he explains. In other words, Ahlquist has been able to build something of a symbiotic relationship with his readers and the people of Rhode Island; he is able to provide a platform for them, and in turn, they will turn to him before other outlets. Their trust in Uprise has allowed the outlet access to local events and enhanced the quality of the coverage they are able to produce and provide. “When I talk to local people,” Ahlquist says, “my interest is not to blow up their thoughts but to amplify their voices.”

Such is the major benefit of local—and, in particular, Communitiesindependent—journalism.andjournalistscanbuilddeep and real relationships with one another, relationships that are not merely based on extracting stories for the benefit of a headline. There comes with local reporting a meticulous attention to the fine print of daily life in small communities, fine print that doesn’t make the cut in national—or, often, even“Partstatewide—headlines.ofanengageddemocracy is that … we spend our days actively engaged in our local communities,” Erica Beshears Perel, the director of UNC’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the Hussman School of Journalism, told the Indy. “Local news is what covers those goings-on—things that truly affect everyday people’s lives. When there is local news coverage, that arms folks and empowers them with the ability to participate in the governance of their community.” Much of what Perel and her colleagues have observed is a media landscape that has become increas ingly condensed, with smaller newspa pers across the country being sold to entities such as media conglomerates and publicly traded companies.

As a result, their performance is judged less by the quality of their reporting than by their ability to boost the margins and stock prices of their buyers. In this shuffle, local outlets have been hollowed out. Buyers are reducing staffing, shrinking physical office spaces, and moving bureaus from expensive downtown locations to cheaper ones on the outskirts of cities. Simply put, resources are no longer being directed towards local reporting. Instead, national coverage—and even sports and enter tainment news—takes precedence.

“What’s happened with the digi tization of content and changes in the marketplace is that there are a lot of other ways now for advertisers to reach consumers in more direct and targeted ways than by putting an ad in a large newspaper that maybe 50% of a city reads,” Perel says.

It’s this major shift in advertising that has pulled so much funding away from reporting—funding that’s critical to keeping newsrooms open and publishing.“Theconversations we’ve been having recently here at Red Ink about media have been around the First Amendment—freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” says David Raileanu, co-founder of Providence’s Red Ink Community Library, a non-profit reading room and organizing space. After a Nazi attack at the library last February, Uprise was the first publi cation to break the story—largely, Raileanu says, because of the overlapping values between the two media institutions. “A lot of people are claiming that their freedom to speak in front of the public is being infringed. This is true, but it’s not necessarily always in the way that the First Amendment was created … These days, the ways that we speak in public and publish our thoughts are largely controlled instead by private corporations, and therefore the decision to speak or publish is determined not by people who are elected, but rather by shareholders and boards of directors.”

This question of the right to publish is one Ahlquist takes seri ously, and one that he feels lucky to be able to avoid. Much of the reason he stepped out on his own was so that he could report and publish without the constant worry of his stories generating ad revenue, clicks, and returns. While running on a donation-based business model has its difficulties, it has afforded him editorial freedom.

This freedom comes not simply in the final decisions of what stories to run and which to hold, but in the pursuit of those stories them selves. During the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the summer of 2020, Ahlquist recalls following a group of marchers for a story. As they walked on, they took a left turn to go up a ramp and onto the highway.

They were met—Ahlquist included—with police and pepper spray, forcing them to run in the opposite direction and hop a fence just to get away from the gas. “When I got back to the original route, everybody was regrouping and

figuring out what was going on. I was talking to some people from one of the news stations, and they tell me: ‘My boss would have fired me if I had walked out on the highway to follow them.’ And I was like: ‘Wait, your boss would have fired you if you had to commit to following and recording the whole story?’” For Ahlquist, his independence means he doesn’t only cover the things he wants to cover, but also gets on record what others can’t

Still, the challenges of running an organi zation with a mission like Ahlquist’s without substantial funding are steep. “There’s no single reporter doing this work in the way that I do it exactly … there are other groups, but they’re all pretty well funded. I work entirely off of donations, and I have a little bit of advertising, but I don’t get paid for that advertising at all,” Ahlquist says. And while the model is working for now, the question that remains is just how long Uprise can be sustained—or if it can live on past Ahlquist. “I don’t know where I’ll be five, ten years from now. I’m fortunate to be able to—barely—afford to do this. But other people aren’t,” Ahlquist says.

The disturbing reality is that many with an interest in journalism—particularly at the local level—are now faced with the choice of earning a living or serving their communities. What Rhode Island, and much of the country, needs now are more reporters like Ahlquist— willing to take up his mantle and both expand and sustain what he started. In the current political climate, it’s undeni able that the type of platform Ahlquist has created fills a critical need for underserved communities. There is the potential for an invaluable and irreplace able symbiosis between communities and news outlets, if reporters can—as Ahlquist has—earn the trust of those that they cover.

LAURA DAVID B’24 should probably check the New York Times before TikTok when she wakes up, but oh well.

“The disturbing reality is that many with an interest in journalism—particularly at the local level are now faced with the choice of earning a living or serving their

“Therecommunities.”isthepotental

for an invaluable and irre placeable symbiosis between communities and news outlets, if reporters can earn the trust of those that they cover.”

THE FIND

How do you lose someone you never had? Or perhaps this assumes that you can lose someone you never had—a selfish declaration of intima cy, of shared lives and love that you rely on in afterthoughts, attempting to disguise the time that becomes unendurable when you are alone. Losing is a privilege. Losing is proof that you’ve shared belonging and reliance with someone. Losing is possessing a second time, but diluted, like when you order a rose-colored drink with ice and the ice melts and you realize liquid has layers.Inever knew my maternal grandmother. She passed away when my mom was still in college, due to a kind of cancer that my family has never told me about. The very few times I think of Grandma, I can’t help imagining my mom losing her. I picture tears on my mom’s persistent, unyielding face, her slightly bulging eyes with light blue contact lenses layered with an inner most transparency that waters and softens their sternness. In this illusory ‘losing’ of a strong, independent mom—someone who always lec tures me on self-reliance, who must have relied on Grandma once and learned how not to when Grandma left—I feel as if I’m losing Grandma myself. As if the pain of that loss has permeated into me through the skin I share with my mom, into the blood streaming down from genera tions that came before.

I find Grandma in her absence. She exists in the conditional sentences of maternal relatives: “If your grandma cooked this, you’d like it even

more.” “If your grandma were still here, she would be stricter on you.” When I, under ear nest stares, distributed my signed, self-pub lished novel to great-uncles and great-aunts as if dispensing travel pamphlets, one of them said, “If only your grandma could read this.” They said Grandma would be really proud if she saw who I am now, if she knew that I’m going to Brown for a degree in English. Sometimes, spontaneously, my mom looks at me and declares that my eyes and nose are similar to my grandma’s, and I try really hard to imagine them on someone else’s face.

The search for Grandma is foggy and unguided because I can only construct her from myself. What was Grandma like if she— according to my mother’s family—wouldn’t have been able to stand my adolescent temperament, would love my writings, and had eyes just like mine? Supporting evidence keeps coming whenever I see them. She would have tutored me in chemistry, taught me proper table manners, and supported my overseas education: hypothesized promises that can only be realized through who I am. Her existence is embedded in these limited interactions with my maternal relatives, in fragments which I know lead to her life and the lives they shared. But I can’t find an open ing into their past because I’m the one who’s supposed to create that entrance, because our lives are too different to be written on the same page. I find Grandma in my maternal family’s absence from my life, in my absence

from their lives, in the reliance on them I didn’t ask for or have. She exists in their simple ac knowledgment of her to me, as a way of grieving her, as a way of loving me. I find Grandma in this overlap of love and+++grief.

In Chinese culture, the Qingming Festival— which falls between April 4 and 6—is for re membering the dead. It’s tricky because almost every traditional Chinese festival follows the lunar calendar, and every year I have to look up specific dates in the more commonly used solar one. But Qingming is now just a three day ‘short break,’ officially designated by the government, despite its thousands of years of history. How do you grieve for someone so artificially?

I often forget about Qingming. I always just knew it was in spring. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really lost the family members we grieved for—the ones my family taught and told me to grieve for. And perhaps I only lost them then, when my family held onto lives that shared my blood yet felt so foreign, relishing invisible embraces while I could not feel the comfort they found in this reiteration of loss. My grief was artificial, like the holiday itself.

During Qingming, or April in general, fam ilies clean dead relatives’ tombstones and deco rate them with ornaments. It’s called 扫墓, “sǎo mù,” in Mandarin, literally meaning “sweeping tombs.” Bright silk ribbons, usually in red. Golden paper ingots that crease if you press too hard. Fake flowers connected by a thin string of pink petals with uneven coloring and edges that cut the topmost layer of your fingertip but bring no pain. People offer incense and real flower bouquets and baskets, sometimes also homemade food and branded wine, and burn fake, paper money with a face value as high as $1 billion, serving “a kind of inflation up there,” as my econ-major cousin always joked. When I was still in middle school, modern creativity had already led to the invention of paper man sions, iPhones, and luxury cars to burn. When it was still allowed, people ignited strings of loud firecrackers, and the sound of powder exploding filled dusty land and dried rivers, sending into the air ashes of burnt, fabricated wealth.

Everything you need for grieving is sold by the cemetery complex’s gate. Stalls lined up on muddy grounds, owners soliciting atten tion away from the dead: a packaged handful of incense for approximately 30 RMB, flower bouquets and baskets reaching up to 200 each, a stack of fake money for 20. I remember, when I was young, staring at the ground and seeing mud and dust clinging onto strangers’ clean shoes while my mom and uncle bought over priced incense, flowers, and decorations. Qing ming—this recurring, collective time for grief— was a lesson. I studied everyone’s gestures and faces, listened to vernaculars of Mandarin, try ing hard to extract hints of sadness. Until I went abroad and couldn’t make it back in April, I grieved with my family every spring, wandering and searching for a state of loss to enter, lost.

Due to the pandemic, I stayed at home in Beijing to finish my senior year of high school remotely. In April 2021, I had a chance to visit Grandma’s grave again after three years of not seeing it. On our way to the cemetery complex in Tianjin, a city about a two-hour drive from Beijing, I yawned repeatedly, attempted to do some AP Literature readings and failed. My par ents, my grandpa, and I gathered with my uncle

who flew back from work in Dalian, my aunt who Ubered from their apartment in Tianjin, and my cousin who was still hungover from an event the previous night. I realized that what losing Grandma felt like to me had always been this strange mixture of present and past—of the ongoingness of our lives and the cessation of hers, of me trying to reconcile such an uneras able divide with the lineage that sustains my unseeable, impalpable tie with her. And only when I see my mom and uncle grieve for their mom, see my grandpa grieve for his wife, do I actually feel the bond between my grandma and me: an absence that defines our relationship by a “lack of,” a void forever tying me to her. I lose Grandma when everyone re-embraces her, for only then can I imagine we shared a pre-existing relationship that I dream of retrieving.

We crossed a labyrinth of graves and of ferings and trees to arrive at Grandma’s grave. It was easy to get lost. Grandma’s tombstone, which I cannot recall exactly, was black marble with golden engravings of her name, birthdate, and death date. Also engraved in white were the names of my grandpa, my parents, my uncle and aunt, and my cousin and I, relationships list ed: “husband Yu Huabei,” “daughter Yu Yan,” “granddaughter Wang Siqi.” I couldn’t take my eyes off of my name. It was something to fill her absence in my life. The only concrete proof that maybe I could lose her, because I did have her. It reminded me of my longing for her—a longing I had subconsciously ignored—sustaining it, finally, with something to dwell on. I finally felt justified to lose, felt worthy of the grief that was supposed to be in me all along.

We cleaned the whole grave with wipes. The coldness of alcohol wrapped around my hand and my grandma’s tombstone. I watched white cotton cloth caress the rigid edges and surfaces, leaving the stone bright and clear like a glaze of melted sugar, the cloth full of brown marks the shape of our hands. When we left for another year and my family came back without my cousin or me, the dust would have returned. Every past Qingming, when I visited that same square of land, I’d always questioned whether it meant anything—whether it meant anything to Grandma if we only returned every 365 days to offer her a temporary glance at our lives. I’d questioned how much intimacy this national ritual of grieving could preserve. We continued cleaning in silence.

The tombstone was set on a podium, with four lions standing on its corners. We wiped them and tied red ribbons around each lion’s neck. We tied one around the top part of the gravestone as well. My mom fixed every bow knot we made. She spread flowers she had got ten yesterday online—knowing the ones sold by the cemetery gate would be too stale and expen sive—on the platform in front of the gravestone. My dad and uncle used their cigarette lighters to ignite the incense; we stuck them on the censer and gathered in a row.

“Mom, we are here to visit you,” my mom said. “We are all doing well, Wang Siqi is going to college this fall, and Yu Hanbo is almost a junior now—it’s crazy how fast life gets, right?” She paused for a second and told my cousin and me to talk to Grandma. My cousin went first: “Grandma, we are all doing great. I transferred to Columbia, admission was probably easier due to COVID—didn’t have super high grades,” he laughed, and my uncle laughed too, adding that “this kid” had founded a company. “Yes, we hosted an Economics panel at Peking University yesterday,” my cousin continued, “sorry nei

ther of us got your chemistry professor genes, not even the STEM genes in general.” We all laughed.Ididn’t know what to say to Grandma. Or more precisely, I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I told her I got into Brown, told her I was graduating high school soon, told her not to worry about me. Repetitive, vague, incomplete things. The same longing I felt when seeing my name engraved under hers grew stronger when I called out “grandma” to a block of stone. It was a word that never came out of my mouth except in circumstances like this. A word that I’ve heard many, many people speak in different languages, a word that shouldn’t feel or be this special. I felt as if I were actually calling her, like she would respond to me and see who I was through her own eyes, instead of me trying hard to recap an absence of three years, an absence of a lifetime, of her lifetime. How could I tell her who I was? I visit her grave every several years and try compressing my time into a fleeting moment—her life stays still, caught by stone, dust, air; mine rushes by, too fast to capture.

and typing, so my cousin took me to a bone setter. We lay on our stomachs with Chinese medicine plasters on our backs, and my cous in told me about this potential girlfriend he had. That night I went home and finished the AP Lit reading; a friend asked me what I did that day and I replied “扫墓,” and we went on to discuss AP Physics.

I lose Grandma in her peripheral exis tence in my actual, normal life, but somehow to me she exists in many ways, beyond life’s basic operations. Sometimes I do something and wonder if, several decades ago, she did the same thing. I see my mom and wonder what she was like as a daughter, see my grandpa and wonder what he was like as a husband. When I occasionally can get lunch with members of my big maternal family, I wonder what Grandma was like as a sister. My imagination of her and the kind of love I feel from her—even though I never really knew my grandma—has influenced me throughout my life. It’s an influence that exists because of her absence: one slowly gathered through the years from the grief and remembrance my family practices over and over again. Her life and her absence are so closely knitted into my mom’s, my grandpa’s, my great-aunts’ lives and theirs so tightly connected with mine— it’s impossible to separate this cloth of lives into individual threads. I never wholly have her, but I also never lose her completely. She is embedded within me; she is part of what I’m part of.

I have been wrong—losing is not a spe cific state you enter and exit. It is an ongo ing process, a gift of lineage that’s passed on through generations, a state of life that proceeds with yours and ones after you. Qin gming is not just a national event for mourn ing, but also a way to pass down loss. During the many spring mornings when I struggled to accept my family’s grief, I was slowly learn ing that it is more important to feel and em brace Grandma’s absence than to make sense of it. That it is more important to remember than to understand. That, perhaps, losing someone is a way of holding onto them, while having them a way of letting go. And maybe I have had Grandma—in the many ways I find her absent, in the many ways I find her there, in the many ways I find her.

Grandma had never felt so close and so far. I didn’t know what to say because I wanted her to actually know me, and I knew she never would. Because everyone had been telling me how proud she would feel and how much she would love me. How do you lose someone you never had? I hold and lose Grandma in these longings, in the almost uncontrollable craving to be loved by her, a love I assume to have with or without her presence. Losing someone you never had is trying to bestow yourself with something non existent. It’s grieving in an imagined space and embracing an invisible kind of love.

At that moment, I hoped so badly to feel that love. At that moment, I felt the same heart break, as if I were to lose that love I’d never had.

We washed our hands by the gate of the cem etery complex and had lunch at a fancy restau rant with my uncle’s family. My shoulders had been hurting because of hours-long Zooming

KATHY WANG B’25 is thinking of her grand ma.

manuscript

two days ago I left my book on your coffee table.

my hand was in your coat pocket polyester fleece you talked three streets as my sleeves grew a few inches

in the room where we lost our socks and rested in each other’s names I left pieces of you in the book.

your voice in paper skin your smile in almond smell your teeth in cluttered letters your tongue in velvet wordsI’m alone in the white space.

empty-handed freshly unwritten I’m left grasping yourfor name.

we used to keep our movements a secret just to hold it to trust that we are still real. I wonder how often you wonder how my hands feel.

now I cradle something like you, leaning on the rotted red wood of the doorframe—these pages crinkling between my fingers, unravelingskin onto the floor withquietlymy eyes.

EVAN DONNACHIE B’24 is wondering whether he’d be the fungi or the algae.

Poem for Lichens

We were born out of a shotgun marriage: Life outside us would have beenless than bearable, so we found comfort in theintimacy of strangers.

Melding into the other, our selves recast we flicker between half and whole.

As we gather in this giving home, the memory of my existence grows distant, the warmth of your embrace familiar;vital

this life is nested all the way isEverydown.Bodyahome—

Content warning: sexual violence mentioned.

In this piece comprised of four wire self-portraits, I juxtapose sexual degradation and the dehumanization of women against feminist power and rage. I came up with the concept for this piece after someone very close to me told me about their experiences of sexual assault. As the text is lovingly addressed to this person, the faces and bodies are directed to the assaulters. It is a denunciation of the current treatment of women as well as a promise that a better future can be clasped within our teeth.

AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTOLANDSCAPEHALLUCINATION

Tan Lin’s Reading, Writing, and Louis Vuitton

Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004.

The Joy of Cooking (2010) is ostensibly a book of poetry, at least according to the blurb that pops up when you Google the title. However, in the words of its author, Tan Lin, the book contains “visual images, meta data tags, bits of programming languages, bar codes, poems, subtitles, editorial notes, found photographs, post cards (from the Swiss Institute), advertise ments, scanned images and printed book pages, annotations, typos, computer-generated hand writing, text translations by Google Translate, and indexes, acknowledgments and forewords by other writers.” The subheading of the— already substantially named—work is [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE]: A BOOK OF META DATA [STANDARDS] DOWNLOADED, RECIPES, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A FLEA MARKET.

postmodern context of extreme technological advancement, late capitalism, and the growing exhaustion and self-referentiality of culture. Instead of the natural world, his poems call for an intuitive unity—mediated by art—between humans and human-made environments and

image of reading these designer objects “for many hours of the afternoon” implies a literal process of reading a text, one of leisure, of enter tainment. In inviting us to read a Louis Vuitton bag like a book (LVLVLVLV) and to read novels— ostensible arbiters of culture—like logos, Lin destabilizes the notion that we encounter art in a fundamentally different way than any other commercial object: “reading” is always infiltrated by wider social and economic structures.

Among Lin’s list of ephemera, however, ‘poems’* take up the largest amount of the book’s page-space—primarily dryly narrated prose poems, which discard most of the figu rative flourishes one might expect of poetic language in favor of obscure, declarative state ments about the aesthetically ‘ideal’ creative text or art object. These include: “It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats’’ and “Like a book, [a painting] should aspire to the most taciturn forms of expression such as greeting cards, photographs of outer space, video monitors turned off, slightly incandescent lightbulbs, automobile windshields at night, billboards…” (Lin seems to enjoy lists). At first, Lin’s writing, given the bareness of its prose and the apparent philistinism advocated for in its content, can seem oblique at best and disingen uous at worst: who would want to read a novel that is like a greeting card? Or, rather, a piece of poetry that describes such a novel?

Early on in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Lin writes, “the poem [or novel] should never be turned off … Like a thermostat, it should regu late the room’s energies.” This formulation seems to propose a work of art which, instead of aiming to produce a heightened and distinctly human emotional reaction, takes on an incon spicuous function of control, adjustment, or mediation between things. Lin describes his own work as “ambient,” which recalls the concept of “ambient poetics,” as introduced in an essay by Timothy Morton in 2002. Focusing his analysis on Romantic poetry, Morton sets forth the idea that certain writing creates a seamlessness or continuity between human subjectivity and nature, causing the two to flow together without a clear division—what he calls a “depthless ecology.” Lin’s work reinterprets ambience in the

wherein words and reading are synthesized into looking and staring” and reading thus becomes “a mechanical and premonitory activity.” A logo, often letters arranged in a specific position and font to trademark branded goods, is a symbol that can exist as both text and image simul taneously and is interpreted as such—that is, through a process somewhere between reading and looking. According to Lin’s poem, perceivers of logos, or logo-like texts, “act like open-source codes”—a term used to describe software that is open to users to change, copy, and distribute freely. As Lin writes in another poem, “PRADA”:

a bag by Louis Vuitton should have its initials prominently scrambled all over its surface in order to be read. And by read I mean not read in any meaningful way. After all, who has really read a

“LOGO” and “PRADA” present us with an idealized, though bleak, vision of an inter-sub jectivity between humans, consumer products, and machines, as mediated through descriptions of an indiscriminate, uniform process of encoun tering texts and images. Lin thus illustrates the extremes of an experience that we, arguably, already inhabit. Under late capitalism, culture is increasingly profit-driven, employment is becoming dependent upon quantifiable efficiency metrics, and our social identities are more and more defined by our data output, collected and sold by surveillance technologies. If we accept as a given that our world is causing humans to aspire to an increasingly commodified, machine-dependent, machine-like existence, a vision of literature that aspires to be a “logolike,” systematically decipherable code starts to seem less and less

first as interpretation: a designer object must be emblazoned with the appropriate logo in order to communicate to the viewer the capital—both monetary and cultural—it signifies. He desig nates this form of automatic recognition as “not … meaningful” reading, but the next sentences seem to directly contradict this statement: the

Lin further complicates the boundaries of what counts as “reading” throughout Seven Controlled Vocabularies, specifically in the book’s inclusion of images. As stated in the quote by Lin at the beginning of this article, many pages of this poetry book are taken up by things that are not poetry. The book is littered with small, blackand-white images of, among many other things, metro tickets, landscapes, ID cards, and the back covers of other books. Many of these images include text in some way, but, due to the size and low resolution of the photos, the words are often too blurry or pixelated to read.

By interspersing photos of illegible text amidst a book of otherwise legible writing, Lin marries the subject of his book with its form. Just as his poems posit a continuity between humans, machines, commodities, and commodified images, Seven Controlled Vocabularies collapses the distinction between text and image, such that the acts of “reading” and “looking at” the book merge into each

* For the sake of clarity, I will be referring to most of the writing in Seven Controlled Vocabularies as ‘poems.’

A “controlled vocabulary” is an organized set of words or phrases used to index knowledge or data: a thesaurus, or Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are a list of headings and subheadings used to catalog library materials. The front cover of Seven Controlled Vocabularies shows Library of Congress Subject Headings that, according to Lin, he made up himself. The title of the book, located on the back cover, is clearly ironic—it could not be said to be orga nized according to any recognizable structure.

The title page says “FOREWORD / LAURA RIDING JACKSON.” This foreword doesn’t come at the beginning of the book, as one would expect, but on page 154, and it’s actually the exact foreword to Laura Riding Jackson’s own book Rational Meaning, reproduced via grayscale photocopy. In addition to adding another compli cation to the book’s already fuzzy distinction between text and images, this gesture confuses the notion of authorship. Seven Controlled Vocabularies contains not only photocopies, but also direct copy-pasted sections from other books—for example, an “Acknowledgements” section taken from the beginning of Reification, Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism by Brown University’s own Timothy Bewes.

Edition 4** side-by-side with the original text is remarkable. The two have the exact same layout, but Edition 4 is slightly ‘off’ grammati cally in some places (see side-by-side compar ison of page 16 below). In others, relationships between words are changed marginally, causing a shift in tone: page 148 in the original is titled “DEDICATION TO A WIFE,” while 7CV Chinese Edition 4 reads “Devoted to his wife.” On the next page, the original text—again not Lin’s own writing, but a quote—undergoes a more succinct transformation: “FOUCAULT EPIGRAPH / There are no machines of freedom, by definition” becomes “Foucault inscription / No machine free, by definition.”

terms of itself.

Seven Controlled Vocabularies is a work of writing that takes the inherent features of digital creation—appropriation, repetition, dispersal, infinite mutability—to a relative extreme. Trying to read it with a discerning critical eye can be confusing, or even annoying: its vague, dispersed structure seems to operate on a logic the reader doesn’t have complete access to. However, this experience is also a reflection of digital subjec tivity. The reader must browse, sometimes skim, pluck out what is most interesting to them. And so the text does, in fact, produce an inter-sub

This technique of appropriation is not a new invention by any means, but Lin reopens this authorship question within the context of contemporary technology and internet culture, reconfiguring the idea of a book of writing by a single author into an amalgamation of refer ences, links, notes, and blurbs that call to mind the use of a computer. Fragments of code and typo-ridden text evoking a copy-paste error (“It rained a lot - It was shitty to be child-less “ “ “”) are scattered among the pages, as well as two seemingly real “Acknowledgements” sections (insofar as they seem to be written by Lin himself), an image-permissions page, and various passages entitled “PREFACE.” At the bottom of page 123, an essay-like meditation on the reality TV show “The Apprentice” is inter rupted by the note “continued on page 222”—and, indeed, the end of the essay can be found on the last page of the book. These techniques empha size a non-linear reading (and writing) experi ence more akin to clicking between web browser tabs than reading a book of creative writing: Lin writes in the “Expanded Preface” to Appendix, a companion book to Seven Controlled Vocabularies, “I am told no one reads anymore but only skims material or jumps from link to link or checks email 40 times an hour.”

Along with the Appendix to Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Lin released a collection of other accompanying materials, still available for physical purchase and free download online, with the self-publishing website Lulu.com. This package includes four versions of a book titled 七受控詞表和2004年訃告, or 7CV Chinese Edition. According to the website, these are four different translations of Seven Controlled Vocabularies: “Edition 1, in traditional Chinese without images. Edition 2, with images. Edition 3, in simplified Chinese with images. Edition 4, reverse translation from simplified Chinese into English.” Each translation was done using Google Google-Translated

Lin’s use of this quote by Foucault clearly exposes the critical valence of his project, including the Google-Translated versions. Humans’ relationship and access to the world being increasingly mediated by technology is dangerous, as it puts us at the behest of massively powerful corporations whose primary goal is to increase their own scope and wealth. Since 2010, when Seven Controlled Vocabularies was published, Google has switched its transla tion service from a simpler statistical machine translation, which uses predictive algorithms to choose the best word and word arrangement for a given sentence, to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), a deep learning system trained to translate whole sentences at a time. Entering the text on page 16 of Seven Controlled Vocabularies into Google Translate English > Chinese (Simplified) and then back again today produces a result that is almost exactly the same as the original text, raising amply debated questions about the future of human labor with the rise of artificial intelligence. However, on the level of the artwork itself, Lin’s use of Google Translate and the irreverence with which he treats his own writing make inspiring use of language’s potential fluctuation in the digital realm.Rather than distorting the ‘original’ meaning of the poems in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 7CV Chinese Edition 4 makes explicit the truth that the concept of an original meaning is essen tially irrelevant: language and its meanings are never static, especially in our era of infinite proliferation and reproduction of information via the internet. The self-reflexive process of Lin’s reverse translation calls to mind collective forms of online ‘authorship’ such as memes, which acquire meaning through repetition and

edge with ever-new innovation, such pursuits are inextricably bound up with corporate interest, which always threatens with a hard limit on who may reap the benefits, and for how long. In its intentional fragmentation, Seven Controlled Vocabularies might offer up a prospect of agency for the reader, the potential to inspire new, collective forms of writing and reading within this system of ever-extending reach. As Lin says himself in an interview, “[Seven Controlled Vocabularies] is less an object with an author than data to be edited, organized, tagged, reformu lated, republished, blurbed, annotated, indexed, resold—by others. And that is what I think reading should be—taking hold of another text, customizing it, disposing of it.”

LUCIA KAN-SPERLING B’24 will only write articles about people named Ta_ Lin, sugges tions appreciated.

** As someone who doesn’t speak Chinese, only be com menting on the 4th edition.

COMMUNITYCOMPLEX

Finding connection in London’s community centers

“Do stay in touch!” As Lolly embraces me to say goodbye, I do not want to fuss. I am about to return to the United States after nine weeks of volunteering with the Little Village, a chil dren’s charity in London, U.K. During my time at Little Village, I sorted children’s clothes with Helena, Sarah, and the Wednesday evening team, and packed family-specific parcels in the day with Lolly, Monica, and Jolly, among other volunteers. In two months, I formed a commu nity in Camden, and I do not want to admit how sad I am to be leaving.

In London, community centers are a key driver of community building. The same spaces that provide high-quality programming and fos ter individual relationships make administrative decisions that have adverse consequences for some of their members. While I worked within community centers, conversations exposed that members and employees found community in relationships with others, not just physical loca tions. However, in the face of ineffective center administration, community is resilient because it exists in interpersonal

The centers I visited exemplify the non-prof it, or third, sector. Not part of the public or private sectors, London’s community centers occupy a space between the two. Buildings are either owned by a non-profit, leased from the local council, or rented from another commu nity organization. Spending on public services peaked in the 2000s under the Labour govern ment, after which came austerity and 12 years of public sector cuts. After the financial crisis, the new Conservative government performed uniform cuts to government departments under the guise of decreasing debt and increasing investment. With stagnant wages and rising

costs of living, services available to low-income households diminished. Priced out of private services and cut off from public ones, these cen ters are propping up a privatized welfare state. Government-provided tax credits previously covered the cost for much of what the food and baby banks now provide. The young children’s programming would have existed at govern ment-run Sure Start Centers. The public welfare system in 2022 is a shadow of what it was only 15 to 20 years ago.

Despite this decline of public services, community centers still serve an important role across the U.K. Funded by the Brown University Royce Fellowship, I took up three volunteer jobs in the borough of Camden looking to investigate how people and community centers interact. As a short-term volunteer, I compared commen tary from users, staff, and other volunteers to material such as administrative reports, press releases, and center branding strategies.

I divided my work between the Kentish Town Community Centre (KTCC), Jewish Community Centre London (JW3), and Little Village. KTCC is your traditional community center, offering fitness classes and room rentals. JW3 is a Jewish-oriented—but open to all—arts and culture center, with a food bank and nurs ery attached. Little Village mixes center activity with remote services. It has several locations around London where volunteers and employ ees pack bespoke parcels of materials needed for raising children under five.

The centers were not perfect places. Fund raisers and administrators often took a narrow view of services and their responsibility to the community, in effect marginalizing those with the greatest need for center programming. At the same time, in my experience every center had regular visitors excited about their return. These organizations constantly make decisions

that simultaneously help and harm their sur rounding communities.+++

The KTCC administration assumes that its users live in Kentish Town and the surrounding neighborhoods. In reality, they are often bus rides away, commuting around an hour for their visit. Those who live further away are equal members of the community, but don’t fit the conventional mold of a center member.

JW3 functions as multiple centers under the same roof. Its staff and members create bonds, sending members from the volunteer service to young adult programming, or from the food bank to language classes.

Little Village, as a center-to-home delivery service, presents an alternative model for com munity building. Staff and volunteers unpack large trucks of children’s materials together. There’s always music playing and conversations covering everything from terrible government policy to Harry Styles at Wembley. Tables cov ered in clothes for toddlers also have cups of tea, snacks, and signs of volunteers’ personal lives. The interaction between volunteers and users is mainly phone calls, with limited in-per son Comparedvisits.

to KTCC, there was more success at Little Village in converting former parcel recipients to long-term volunteers or employees. Other Little Village centers had daycare sessions, which allowed volunteers to bring children. There was the socialization and friendship between volunteers and staff on their weekly shifts, leading to long-term relationships between members who became volunteers and then employees. But for many, it’s a short-term community, marked by the note from whomever packed their parcel.

+++

Income brackets and social backgrounds are often decent indicators of who uses which ser vices. There are plenty of in-and-out members who come and go on their own for a singular class, often fitness. For these mostly financially stable people, center membership is secondary to participation in a class. Their presence is not center-specific: a gym could fill the same role.

In contrast, without the community center, other members—primarily low-income mem bers—would not have access to key services. These are the parents and children at their only play group of the week, or pensioners watching films with otherwise-unaffordable ticket costs.

When community centers cater to mostly higher-income in-and-out visitors, they begin to look like private members’ clubs. This summer, I argued with KTCC coworkers for free stayand-play spaces, but the proposition was reject ed on the basis that a paying customer might want the room. This hypothetical customer had not reserved it, they just might

Once you know to look for it, this style of management—akin to a for-profit leisure center—is pervasive. Strollers were kept out side because they brought in the dirt; changing tables were removed from bathrooms. Affluent customers or those bringing in additional coun cil funds were given priority to continue activi ties, even when free resources were previously scheduled. Those waiting for food parcels they otherwise couldn’t afford were made to wait longer than council members, visiting police of ficers, or paying guests. The community center can resemble rented real+++estate.

These decisions all have a potentially rational explanation, but together they placed people at the margins. Two community centers seem to emerge in one space: one is meant for low-in come members, the other for those with £10£20 a week set aside for recreational activities. Overlap is rare. The members who need a community center, not a business space, receive second-class membership. Hundreds of pounds get spent on ticketed events marketed to young professionals while the food pantry runs bare. But many more people use the food bank than the evening arts programming.

Treatment, which should be based in equity, is often dependent on professional and social connection. Low-income London residents who come after a call from a social worker have received £20 of fresh groceries, theoretically enough for the week. By contrast, those who come to the center without an official referral normally receive £7 to £10 of non-perishables— not enough for a week of meals. One member in question came twice throughout the summer,

both times at the urging of her social worker, and had not eaten for three days before either visit. Had she come without the advance notice of council workers, she may have been treated as other frequent food bank members were, with a voucher to a larger food bank instead of actual food. This assistance is not sufficient for someone with no car, a toddler in a stroller, and no guarantee they can afford the needed bus ride. Community thrives in high-quality, ac countable spaces.

+++

Centers represent a fraction of London’s com munity building. As I met Londoners, they defined community through their interpersonal relationships more than through the places they visited. It is in the cups of teas served, the occa sional free homemade snacks, the films shown, or the needed living essentials received. Com munity starts with the decision of two friends to meet up at each other’s homes for a cup of tea and a chat. It continues when those friends decide to join a local, free fitness class offered by a center not far from where one of them lives. Sometimes it is fleeting, sometimes it is long-term. It doesn’t stop when Camden meets Islington or where Greater London turns to Herefordshire, Essex, or Kent. It comes from big events of the year like London Pride and casual meet-ups after the school run.

While the U.K. experiences a “brain drain” to London, much of the U.K. is represented in the city’s communal microcosms. At JW3, I met Jews whose families hailed from Glasgow and Belfast and saw incredible friendships between KTCC’s employees who hailed from Stoke and MiltonCommunityKeynes. is declining and thriving. It is naturally uneven, existing in a center’s finished cups of coffee and rolled boccia balls. It does not fit school schedules or break for summer vacations. The food bank short on volunteers in June is full of them in July—though they make 160 bags either week.

Building community is fraught work, complicated by both the class tensions that shape centers and inherent variability of human relationships. You can provide spaces, resourc es, activity, and affordability, but you can’t force people to attend events. Nor should you, at least in London, where individuality and inde pendence are as key to community as a BBQ in a local park.

The fluidity of community creates a dilem ma for centers. It is unhealthy and unrealis tic to consider the center as the nucleus of a community. Yet their funding is determined by data collected within the center walls. Public ly funded, privately run community projects, like the three Camden centers I visited, receive six-figure grants from local councils and nation al government, according to their 2022 Charity

Commission reports. JW3 and Little Village re ceive funds from Camden Council to run a food bank and youth service, respectively. Funding is linked to the center location and the addresses of the Londoners you serve. It’s a logical propo sition, but one based on an outdated view of the trip to a community center. The current funding approach assumes people take solitary trips to the community center to access services that interest them. In contrast, I watched centers become spaces where friends spanning multiple London boroughs met throughout the summer. These relationships, often including staff mem bers, take publicly available infrastructure and give the community center its name.

Community is liminal, existing in and between public infrastructure and private relationships. The centers that seek to house community are always in need of change to support new forms of community and combat rampant inequality. Community lives not in the buildings and schedules of these centers but in the relationships between people. On a single day at KTCC, I would deliver food parcels, set up classes, connect refugees to job applications, and even watch the Prime Minister’s resignation speech. Before I knew it, the center was empty, the community was on the street corner, and I was back to making cups of tea.

GABRIELLE SHAMMASH B’24 thinks you should drink tea.

Presents...

I’m sick of people saying that humanities classes never apply to the real world. Today, I’m teaching the oh-so-applicable Seduc tion 101, and you can rest assured that seduction isn’t a sci ence—it’s an art. This week’s advice-seekers have finally stopped thinking about silly things like the economy or linear algebra in order to focus on what’s really important: hot people and how to pursue them.

From what I can tell, you’re perfectly equipped to seduce. There’s no reason for you to be having trouble with sealing the deal…unless you’re afraid of what might happen if you succeed.

Dear Indie,

I’m tired of shouting WHAT’SYOUR CONCENTRATION in asweaty basement. There has to be abetter way to flirt with someone at a party. Right?

Love, WHAT DID YOU SAYYOUR NAME WAS?

Dear WHAT DID YOU SAY YOUR NAME WAS?,

There is no better way to flirt with someone at a party than by shouting WHAT’S YOUR CONCENTRATION in a sweaty basement. I say this with the utmost joy, optimism, and awe. Isn’t there something beautiful about partaking in an age-old ritual of attraction, dancing the same an cient dance as our collegiate predecessors*? WHAT’S YOUR CONCEN TRATION, we shout, and in doing so we become a part of something bigger, connected to all of humanity in our desire to reach out, to touch, to close the distance between people and between bodies.

I can understand why you might be frustrated, though. The ancient ritual loses its shimmering magic when it sounds like this: What’s your concentration? Oh, cool, what classes are you in? Oh, gotcha, what dorm are you living in?

For the incantation to work, you must speak it with passion, heart, and creativity. You ask: What’s your concentration? They say: EEPS. You say: If you were a rock, what kind of rock would you be? Or they say chemistry, and you ask which element on the periodic table would be the sexiest in human form. Or they say medieval studies and you ask what they would launch out of a trebuchet if they could launch anything out of a trebuchet. Or they say econ and you just walk away. But, with the exception of that scenario, the dance will continue.

To know someone’s concentration is to know something they care deeply about, something that excites them about the world. Treat that information as valuable, as magical, and as sexy, because it is. And once you enchant them with your perfect, non-boring follow-up questions, you can utter the next centuries-old ritual phrase: Do you want to go somewhere quieter?

If you learn anything useful from this week’s column, go out into the world and put your newfound seduction skills into prac tice, preferably directed at me. I’m proud to announce I’ve decided to stop seducing and start being one of the hot people who get pur sued. Now that I’ve made this announcement, I should be drown ing in suitors within three to five business days, so you should move quickly. mean “dance” metaphorically, unless wethink our

Is it possible that, having mastered the witty remarks and flirty com ments, you’re stopping yourself from having to venture into that realm in which you are no expert, the realm of intimacy? Are you reluctant to surrender the control that comes with keeping things light, to cede your self entirely to the vulnerability of diving deeper? Are you hiding behind those clever, upbeat, tastefully comedic words?

No? That doesn’t sound like you?

Okay. Well. Anyways, the world was unfortunately designed in a cra zy way where you have to take risks in order to reap potential rewards, like some kind of twisted board game or something. Acknowledge the risk, realize the potential damage isn’t so bad, suck it up, ask for that number, and then go confront my—I mean, your intimacy issues.

Dear Indie,

I keep

tionlearningaccidentallypersonalinformaaboutthepersonIhave

a crush on. This is partially because I have stalked them on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and because my friends keep telling me gossip. Among other things, I know what TV shows they watch, the name of their mom, and every internship they’ve had since 2019. On the one hand, some of this infor mation could be useful for starting the conversation and finding ways to connect. On the other hand, I’m worried I could accidentally mention something about them I’m not supposed to know yet, which would be really bad. What’s the best strategy to win them over without creeping them out?

Love,Cursed with KnowledgeKnowledge,withCursedDear

Your very modern problem has similarities to some very old stories, like, ancient-Greek old. Oedipus was cursed with the knowledge that he killed his dad and married his mom, and that all made him gouge his eyes out. Cassandra was cursed with knowledge of the future, and I actually don’t remember what happens in her story but I don’t think she liked it very much either.

Compared with that, your knowledge isn’t so burdensome at all! But you do have to think carefully in order not to end up with gouged-out eyes or whatever happened to Cassandra. I would try not to use your intel too actively. Consider it a sneak peek of what to expect when your crush talks to you, and not a guidebook of what to bring up when you talk to them. That way, you can appear reasonably knowledgeable about the things they’re interested in without seeming creepily knowledgeable about their mom, or whatever. In fact, let’s just keep moms out of the picture altogether for a while.

Dear Indie,

I have great banter. I’m good at landing jokes, telling charming anecdotes, and asking the right ques tions at the right time. I’ve had many different flirtatious interactions (after class, at parties, in the Ratty line) that could be considered successful, except…it never goes anywhere. I can’t even manage to get anyone’s number. Why do I keep chickening out at the critical moment? Love, Closing TimeDear Time,Closing

bulle t i n

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Saturday 9/24 @ 8PM-1AM: Situated Gala: A Lavish Night of Excellence

Situated is a Black-owned clothing brand emphasizing the importance of community and resilience. This gala is focused on celebrating excellence within the community, and showcases art, music, and fashion. General admission tickets cost $25 and can be bought at this link: tinyurl.com/ situated-gala

Location: The Bomes Theater, 1017 Broad Street, Providence, RI 02905

Saturday 9/24 (+ October 8th and November 5th) @ 10AM-2PM: Providence Walking Tour: The River at the Heart of the City Participate in this historical walking tour of Providence to learn specifi cally about the river’s historical and current influence over the area and its people. Tickets are free, although reservations are required. You can get a reservation

Location:tinyurl.com/pvd-walking-tourhere:ProvidencePedestrian

Bridge, South Water & James Streets, Providence, RI 02903

Sunday 9/25 @ 2-5PM: OUTSPOKEN!

A poetry series aimed at providing safe spaces for artists—particularly POC artists—to speak, Outspoken is hosting its one-year anniversary event! Four showcase poets will be performing. General admission is free, but you can RSVP to enter raffles for prizes here:

Location:tinyurl.com/outspoken-1MichaelS.VanLeesten Memorial Bridge S. Water Street at James Street, Providence, RI 02903

Tuesday 9/27 @ 1PM: RI Green Bond Kick Off Event

The #YesOn3RI campaign is in support of a green bond on the November ballot that would raise millions of dollars to finance climate change prevention projects for Rhode Island. Attend this kick-off event to learn more about the campaign and hear from state and local officials, environ mental advocates, and other community members.

Location: Farm Fresh Rhode Island, 10 Sims Avenue Unit #103, Providence, RI 02909

Tuesday 9/27 @ 4-5:30PM: Megan Ming Francis: How to Capture a Movement: Politicians, Philanthropists, and the Fight for Racial Justice

In this webinar, Megan Ming Francis, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown, examines the history and future of the connection between politicians, philanthropists, and social movements. Register for the webinar

Location:tinyurl.com/register-megan-ming-francishere:VirtualEvent

Wednesday 9/28 @ 12PM: ALL OUT for Karina and Clew

Karina Santamaria, a seventh-year PhD candidate in Public Health, and Clew, a Brown/Trinity Masters of Fine Arts Theater program student entering their third year, are at risk of being forced out of their graduate programs due to Brown University’s restriction of their sources of income and refusal to grant temporary leave due to family illness. Come join us and the Graduate Labor Organization to support them and tell Brown that they deserve to maintain their spots as graduate students.

Location: Main Green

Arts

Thursday 9/22-10/2 @ 4PM or 7PM: Matilda the Musical

Watch a musical of the famous story of an extraordinarily talented girl. General admission tickets start at $22 and can be purchased online: Location:tinyurl.com/matilda-tixJamesandGloria

Maron Cultural Arts Center, 180 Button Hole Drive, Providence, RI 02909

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!

All Day until September 30th: Not Never More

This art exhibition, featured daily until September 30th, features two Rhode Island artists: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Deborah Spears Moorehead, who’ve created artwork in response to the Center for Public Humanities’ historic and problematic wallpaper, “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord.” There is no cost to attend the exhibit.

Location: The David Winton Bell Gallery in the List Art Building & the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

All Day until December 18th: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

This art exhibition, featured daily until December 18th, portrays and explores the relationship between the US prison system and visual art. There is no cost to attend the exhibit.

Location: The David Winton Bell Gallery in the List Art Building & the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redis tributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

+ Help a Community Organizer Avoid Eviction

Donate at tinyurl.com/helpstopeviction

A longtime community organizer and housing justice advocate is facing eviction in October. He has had to survive on a low income, and a recent car accident has increased his challenges. We deeply appreciate his tireless work with people experiencing homelessness, and we need to prevent him from losing housing himself!

+ Project LETS Providence COVID-19 Relief Fund Donate at projectlets.org/covid19 Project Let’s Erase The Stigma (LETS) is working in coalition with various grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to support marginalized groups in our community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. All donations will directly help individuals, children, and families meet their basic needs.

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass

Support sex workers statewide, priority given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted the pandemic

+ Queer & Trans Mutual Aid Providence Venmo: @qtmapvd; Paypal: qtma.pvd@gmail.com / Info: tinyurl.com/qtma-pvd QTMA PVD is a small, volunteer-run mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence, RI area. They do payouts once per week and have distributed over $80,000 since their founding in June 2020. They currently have over 30 outstanding requests for aid and would appreciate any donations!