Masthead*
MANAGING EDITORS
Charlie Medeiros
Angela Qian
Lily Seltz
WEEK IN REVIEW
Christina Peng
Jean Wanlass
ARTS
Cecilia Barron
Nora Mathews
Kolya Shields
EPHEMERA
Quinn Erickson
Lucas Galarza
FEATURES
Madeline Canfield
Lola Simon
Ella Spungen
LITERARY
Evan Donnachie
Tierra Sherlock
Everest Maya Tudor
METRO
Kian Braulik
Sacha Sloan
Cameron Leo
Nicholas Miller
SCIENCE + TECH
Mariana Fajnzylber
Lucia Kan-Sperling
Caleb Stutman-Shaw
WORLD
Tanvi Anand
Arman Deendar
Angela Lian
X
Claire Chasse
Joshua Koolik
DEAR INDY
Solveig Asplund
LIST
Chachi Banks
Saraphina Forman
BULLETIN BOARD
Qiaoying Chen
Angelina Rios-Galindo
19
From the Editors
Mall Chinese food, Pedialyte, a mysterious and dislocated restaurant by the water. Providence on the tail end of summer, interpolated by misty sheets. Endless bowls, bowls used as ashtrays, goodbye to my subletter called Tiffany. I haven’t quite caught up with the times. My phone has been dying on thirteen percent. Still, the air shines with bright and lonely edges. On Power nothing changes. Maybe catching up isn’t the point. -AQ
There is not much to do in Portland, Oregon, between the hours of 7 and 11pm, at least when you’re with your fifteen-year-old sister and the fog is in. Why not lend this pre-flight time, then, to a pair of American institutions long neglected by the pair of us: the urban mall, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie franchise. Hum of four escalators, “What’s Up” by the Non-Blondes featured on the soundtrack—that’s all I can siphon out of these not-quite-vacant hours. But I wasn’t disappointed. No need, for once, to sort out what hours were meant to stick and which were meant to give. After takeoff, weeks before I would sit in Conmag, digging for scraps out of a time made to be forgotten. -LS
STAFF WRITERS
Aboud Ashhab
Maya Avelino
Benjamin Balint-Kurti
Beto Beveridge
Dri de Faria
Keelin Gaughan
Jonathan Green
Emilie Guan
Yunan (Olivia) He
Dana Herrnstadt
Jenny Hu
Anushka Kataruka
Corinne Leong
Priyanka Mahat
Sarah McGrath
Kayla Morrison
Abani Neferkara
Luca Suarez
Julia Vaz
Siqi/Kathy Wang
Zihan Zhang
Daniel Zheng
COPY CHIEF
Addie Allen
COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS
Rafael Ash
Victoria Dickstein
Maria Diniz
Eleanor Dushin
Benjamin Flaumenhaft
Aidan Harbison
Mia Huang
Jason Hwang
Becca Martin-Welp
Nadia Mazonson
Taleen Sample
DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR
Corinne Leong
Angela Lian
Ella Spungen
SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM
Jolie Barnard
Kian Braulik
Angela Lian
Kolya Shields
Yuna Shprecter
*Our Beloved Staff
Mission Statement
COVER COORDINATOR
TBD
DESIGN EDITORS
Gina Kang Ash Ma
Sam Stewart
DESIGNERS
Jolin Chen
Riley Cruzcosa
Sejal Gupta
Kira Held
Xinyu/Sara Hu
Avery Li
Anahis Luna
Tanya Qu
Zoe Rudolph-Larrea
Eiffel Sunga
Simon Yang
ILLUSTRATION EDITORS
Julia Cheng
Izzy Roth-Dishy
Livia Weiner
ILLUSTRATORS
Sylvie Bartusek
Aidan Xin-he Choi
Avanee Dalmia
Michelle Ding
Anna Fischler
Lilly Fisher
Haimeng Ge
Seungwoo Hong
Ned Kennedy
Avery Li
Mingjia Li
Ren Long
Jessica Ruan
Meri Sanders
Sofia Schrieber
Isa Sharfstein
Luca Suarez
WEB EDITORS
Kian Braulik
Hadley Dalton
Matisse Doucet
Michael Ma
MVP
Saraphina
The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA
The College Hill Independent 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.
Week in One Man’s Trash
→ Last June I bought a $30 bike off a man named Herbert I’d met over Facebook. He’d listed a bunch of fixer-upper bikes on Facebook Market place, and after a day or so of messaging, my roommate and I drove to his house in Lincoln, Rhode Island to choose which two-wheeler would be my primary mode of school-year transportation.
Herbert, a retired detective, had a long asphalt driveway and an overgrown front yard strewn with bicycles in various states of repair. He let me try a purple one, then a gray one, which I liked better. He had tufts of white hair coming out of his ears, and his arms were tanned and wrinkled. He wore a navy blue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and spoke with the most dramatic Rhode Island accent I’ve ever heard.
“That’s 30 dollars, and you have a 30-day warranty, so if something’s wrong with it, you can return it and I’ll give you your money back.”
Later that month, the same roommate and I drove to Federal Hill to pick up a TV from a 30-ish-year-old woman wearing rain bow bunny slippers and a Harry Styles t-shirt.
“And it works totally fine?” I asked, even though she’d already messaged me that yes, it does.
“Yeah,” she said, “I just have a different one that I wanna use.”
“Facebook Marketplace knows my taste,” a friend told me in July. We were sitting on the brown couch in her apartment, watching nothing important on TV, sweating and fanning ourselves with our hands. “Like, it keeps giving me listings for mid-century mod ern lamps.”
My Facebook habits were those of an addict. Even though I didn’t need anything, I would scroll through listings of old tablecloths, box fans, half-used jars of peanut butter. One woman listed her col lection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer adult coloring books, available for pickup in Fox Point. Someone else advertised a toilet paper stand; another asked in the Buy Nothing East Side group if anyone had an extra COVID test and attached an unrelated photo of their grandson eating a lemon. “Anyone need a kid’s bike helmet?” I’d say to friends. “This one has flames on it!”
My own apartment is furnished with things from others—couches from previous tenants, carpets from graduated friends, chairs from Facebook Marketplace and Providence
items. The spaces in which we live are a jumbled amalgamation of people who have already left.
In Mount Hope, I picked up a yellow armchair from a young mom in Lululemon leggings. She spoke to me like we were family friends, asking about my classes (hectic) and summer (so good). I stepped over an abacus and a stuffed dog on the way out.
Right before classes began, my friend from Portland, Maine told me she couldn’t join the East Side Providence Buy Nothing Facebook group because she was already in the Portland one, and according to Buy Nothing law, you can’t be in two groups at once. This made me unreasonably sad because Buy Nothing, more so than Facebook Marketplace, even, has become a reminder that not everyone is 18-22 years old, not everyone is uncertain. A half hour’s walk from campus, there are youth soccer practices and backyard cookouts and plastic tricycles lying in driveways. There are people who have careers and people who know how to use rice cookers properly.
Campus was empty over the summer, so the East Side was only for the kids and adults and dogs in the community. The Main Green itself was quiet, deserted, and I felt like one of the only people in the world. So I scrolled and liked and commented that I was interested in a throw pillow from Warren, a set of curtains from Pawtucket, a ladle from downtown. Nothing came of my compulsive messaging, except it was something to do, something to feel like a real person on solid ground. Now that Brown is full and loud and bright again, now that I have a bed frame, there’s less to seek, and other people’s things are less enticing.
I’m no longer an obsessive Facebook user because I don’t have the time. I miss it—it gave me a way to understand the difference between vintage and retro, to misunderstand poorly typed messages from strangers, and to stretch my world wider. I’m still on the hunt for a ladle, though, so if you have any leads, send ‘em my way.
UN
RELENTING BREAKABLE FEELING
INTERNET STOICISM ON THE :
( TEXT ABANI NEFERKARA DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER )→ “Stoicism: Become Undefeatable” is conjured forth by the YouTube algorithm onto my recommended page. The how-to guide to remaining ‘undefeated’ under any circumstance opens with the line: “we suffer more in imagination than in reality,” a quote from the Greek philosopher Seneca. The video, already viewed more than 9.5 million times, hosts a fervent comment section conferring about how the philosophy has changed their life or reciting other quotes of fortitude and discipline. Next up on the page are podcast clips of David Goggins, retired U.S. Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner. In a now-iconic sound bite born from Goggins’ Navy SEAL training, in which squads were forced to carry 200-pound inflatable boats for hours in a grueling test of strength, endurance, and mental fortitude, he asks—no, demands— “who’s going to carry the boats?” That call now reaches his 8.6 million followers on Instagram alone. The words “mental toughness is a lifestyle” slip from the speakers before I shut my laptop in a panic.
Later, I meet a friend for coffee, and we open his TikTok, only to find Disney Channel’s nonchalant Ferb—usually just trying to find something to do for the summer—recast as a stony-hearted nineyear-old cultivating absolute control over his emotions, unflinching in the face of the absurd cartoon world in which he resides. Swipe. Edit of manga series Vinland Saga’s protagonist Thorfinn proclaiming he has no enemies in a Viking battlefield bloodied by war. Even after his invaders have brutalized and enslaved him, he remains ever a pacifist and endures the next cruel fate thrust upon him by the series narrative. Swipe. One of a thousand montages of Greek philosopher statues looking pensive and buff, their thick beards and chiseled physiques in stark contrast to the more feminine likes of Timothée Chalamet and Harry Styles. This video’s narration espouses the gospel of how viewers—presumably young men who seek to become as physically and mentally rugged as the statues they are shown—must endure any hardship and find the logical solution to prevail in the fight that is life.
Welcome to the era of internet stoicism. Over the course of the past 10 years, the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism has quietly risen in popularity, seemingly accelerated over the past three years by the coronavirus pandemic. If you know where to look, stoicism’s reach can be found everywhere: from the internet limelight of TikTok memes and YouTube self-help videos to the discourse of corporate training workshops on how overworked employees can manage stress in order to hit company deadlines. The trend is so popular that sales of Marcus Aurelius’ seminal stoic text Meditations, originally penned in the second century C.E., skyrocketed to over 100,000 copies in 2019, up from a spare 16,000 copies sold only seven years prior. While stoicism has been branded as a philosophy that can speak to people from any walk of life, the audience of stoic content seems to be overwhelmingly male: an r/stoicism Reddit poll revealed only 12 percent of participating users are female, and in my personal life this pattern seems to hold true.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece around 300 B.C.E. by the merchant Zeno. After he was driven into poverty by a shipwreck, Zeno turned to practicing philosophy, contemplating the importance of cultivating virtue and personal fortitude. As Zeno gained followers, the philosophy spread throughout the Greek and, later, Roman worlds, gaining popularity among those of all social classes.
At its core, stoicism focuses on following a set of carefully defined virtues in order to lead an ethical, and thus happy, life. The four major virtues of stoicism are wisdom (knowing what you should choose, be aware of, and be indifferent toward); temperance (engaging moderately in all things with neither excess nor deficiency); courage (standing up for what you believe is right and persisting for your cause); and justice (acting morally and serving your fellow man). It teaches that only through embodying these virtues, and not by means of wealth and status, can you find happiness, success, meaning, and even love. Stoics also often write about living in accordance with nature. This can be understood as the nature of the universe, which
Marcus Aurelius writes is constant change: therefore, in turn, people must come to accept change and to accept the world for what it is, not what we think it should be. Living in accordance with nature can also relate to human nature: on one hand, humans possess fundamental instincts toward nourishment and self-defense, but instincts should be moderated with the other aspect of human nature, the ability to reason. This idea echoes stoicism’s virtues that advocate for a focus on responding to issues in a logical way, unbiased by emotions like anger, fear, or sadness, a sentiment that clearly appeals to male audiences that have been conditioned to favor rationality over emotion within the context of a Western society.
In a time when war and disease were common, a philosophy centered not on controlling the events that occur in your life, but on how you react to them, may have been a comfort. The idea of stoicism as a tool to cope with the ups and downs of life seems to play a large role in its rise in popularity within the last three to five years as a response to a world blighted by a confluence of increasing social, political, environmental, and economic instability, all made worse by the COVID pandemic. People have been left with an endemic sense of helplessness over the most significant aspects of their lives, which may be why, in the face of a seemingly unchangeable system that is failing them, stoicism’s emphasis on personal responsibility or capacity for what one can change is so captivating for some. With the rise of figures like Andrew Tate and the current debate of a modern ‘masculinity crisis,’ there seems to be a particular niche for content that offers guidance for male audiences, and specifically for a brand of individualistic advice. In today’s cultural obsession with the “crisis of masculinity” (referenced everywhere from articles in liberal publications to talk shows by conservative pundits to full-length academic works), stoicism’s rise is yet another symptom of men who have become disillusioned and disaffected by the American political system, shifting cultural norms, and an arduous labor market demanding unsustainable productivity. Those who feel these pain points most acutely tend to be younger, white men who at increasing rates may feel like they are losing their place in the world. More and more, this content holds a self-improvement bent that stoic content now closely follows. An individual approach to self-improvement and lifestyle change reaffirms the way it can often be hard for men to reach out to others for help, when patriarchal norms expect men to be self-sufficient and able to handle issues on their own.
In contrast, the many stoic philosophers featured in online content (and their respective flawless marble effigies) are rendered unshakable gods among men. Their minds, temples of disciplined contemplation, are a bastion of tranquility in the face of war, betrayal, poverty and strife. While one may generally think of philosophers as the quiet type that sits in the sun musing on the petal of a flower, stoic philosophers are often portrayed in this context as the epitome of Greek masculinity: strong, capable, and able to move mountains with their intellectual prowess.
This portrayal seems to harken back to a time when ‘men were men’: didn’t cry, didn’t talk about their feelings, focused on being the strong protector and provider. This phrase has only become more common in the current discussion of what masculinity should look like today and as some advocate for a return toward a more traditional definition. As touched on in the New York Times podcast Matter of Opinion, there are many men who feel like the mainstream male ideal embodied by figures like Timothée Chalamet is either unappealing
or simply unachievable. His aesthetic— soft and boyish, while maintaining heterosexual appeal—is only appealing because he is conventionally attractive. Millions of men were drawn to figures like Andrew Tate because he validated more traditional desires like a sports car and a six pack, things that on their own are mostly innocuous but which have become hallmarks of toxic masculinity. Stoicism has in turn become a new, more palatable pathway toward achieving traditional masculinity through the veneer of self-improvement, and its associated content entices viewers with the chance to gain an ounce of the greatness of these ancient men.
Modern stoicism’s extreme emphasis on responding to events through temperance of your emotions and reasoning plays into traditional tropes of masculinity, such as focusing on being highly logical and even repression of emotions. That is why stoicism has found root in an era culturally committed to mental health and therapy. Internet stoicism takes up the language of personal introspection and moral self-growth— without actually requiring its male adherents to take stock of their emotions. Especially for Gen Z-ers who feel disempowered politically and economically, the views of stoicism provide a practical method to cope with these stressors, such as accepting hardship as inevitable or reframing their perspective. In many ways, this perspective mirrors the classic advice of only attempting to change the things you can directly control. But contemporary stoicism seems to take this to the extreme: asking men to dominate their emotions in order to become completely rational. This is reflected in stoic content that stresses that one’s unhappiness stems from their emotions, not their surroundings, so being able to remove oneself from these emotions will lead to the ability to endure any situation—to “Become Unbreakable.” However, this attitude not only prompts inaction on a social scale but emphasizes anesthetizing the self against the realities of daily life. I suppose it is unsurprising that stoicism aligns with these tropes of men being strong and unfeeling, given that it arose
in an ancient society that was deeply patriarchal, shaping men into the ideal soldiers, politicians, and rulers preoccupied with empire building. In many ways, stoicism functioned as a guiding masculine ideology behind the long arc of Western culture and its legacy of patriarchy. Stoicism’s present reliance on masculinity and emotional suppression is apparent in work motivation and productivity culture. While there was already plenty of productivity content before the rise of contemporary stoicism (think waking up at 4am, two hours in the gym, checking the stock market right as it opens, three passive income streams, etc.) the ideas of stoicism fit into that niche. Patriarchal ideology expects men to be the primary breadwinner: a man’s income or level of professional success is seen as a measure of his worth. In that unending pressure to chase success at any cost, for men specifically, but also for people in general, stoicism is seen as a philosophical toolkit for putting all else aside to focus on one’s work or professional goals. This propagates a patriarchal ideology that blames a lack of professional success, insufficient income, or a struggle to cope with over-demanding workplaces on the failures of individual men to conform to their prescribed social roles.
Not only is the recent use of stoicism a harmful recapitulation of historic masculinity standards, it is also misleading, reconfiguring the ancient philosophy to put faith in inadequate solutions for today’s widespread social problems. While the original philosophy advocated maintaining discipline in one’s life in a broad sense, stoicism has now become popular as a methodology of coping, with adherents emphasizing principles of endurance through times of inevitable, untransformable hardship. This idea of accepting one’s circumstances combines two ideologies: it feeds into the mythos of American individualism that demands people take complete accountability for their own situations and happiness; and it relies on the premise, as described earlier, that men must deal with their circumstances through unemotional personal effort. Both of these things distract from the need to question dominant systems and demand their reconstruction. Stoicism’s resurgence is not just another symptom of latestage capitalism—it particularly asserts men as the vital agents of the same socioeconomic order that causes them to feel out of control.
In this instance, stoicism acts as a short-
term coping mechanism for these issues rather than encouraging men to look beyond the individual to address entrenched systemic issues, and to wrestle with what masculine selfhood could look like beyond traditional realms of physical discipline and wealth. These trends take a base level understanding of stoicism’s philosophy to highlight the focus on individual responsibility and control without the emphasis on helping others (serving your fellow man). Contemporary stoicism’s insistence on accepting events supposedly outside of one’s control, and omission of systemic issues, raises the question of at what point rhetoric around enduring hardship loses its value. That isn’t to say stoicism itself is bad, but that online stoics lack nuance and fail to understand stoicism’s more complex concepts.
This ‘simplified stoicism’ has become a new form of support for a festering issue of people feeling powerless and disengaged with the state of the world, as well as regressing toward more traditional views on what masculinity should be. Take for example, the idea that one must look past their own emotions and think about every situation logically. As described, this idea seems to tie in with other traditionally masculine ideas of repressing or ignoring one’s own emotion in favor of logic. However, the true stoic philosophy, or at least my interpretation of it, is that you must first become deeply in touch with your own emotion before you can take the ‘logical’ next step. The stoics would argue that by opening up to and taking the time to understand your emotions, you can identify the emotions that would lead you to construct illogical ideas based on biases or assumptions and avoid them. While some may discover pearls of wisdom in the sea of stoic ideas and discussions taking place on the internet today, we must first look at what the creation of modern stoicism loses when it is simplified for men of the digital age.
FAULTY TOWERS
On March 10, 2023, after seven years of planning, the dream of a 600-foot tower in Providence collapsed. In a press release, the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission, which oversees the revitalization of 26 acres of former highway lands where the tower would’ve stood, reported that the Fane Organization was “no longer [interested in] proceeding with the proposed development.” It’s not surprising that the would-be gargantuan stamp on the Jewelry District’s Parcel 42—with a development cycle halting at best, floundering at worst—never came to fruition. Let’s reset the mise en scéne back to the beginning—before elisions of zoning laws, neighborhood clamor, and a Rhode Island Supreme Court case—in order to play out the theatrics behind the (almost) tallest skyscraper in Rhode Island.
In November 2016, Manhattan property developer Jason Fane came around to the “virtues of Providence” and proposed the development of three glass-and-brick towers, the tallest of which would be over double the height of the Superman Building. After mounting concerns from the Jewelry District neighborhood association that the triplets would not “fit the scale and character of the city,” Fane scaled back the design, eventually settling on the infamous 46-story single tower in 2018.
Even before starting a scuffle in the Providence City Council, the redesigned Fane Tower drew ire from housing justice organizations. In an open letter, a coalition comprising Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP), and the association Neighbors 4 Revilitzation announced that their support for the project was contingent on the following Community Benefits Agreements between them and the de-
IGNORANCE
A Retrospective on Spending
veloper. The list stipulated “contributions to the city to fund rehabilitation of abandoned properties” and the designation of “at least 40 percent of all housing created in the development as affordable to very low and low income families in Providence.” Their opposition was met with a parry from Fane’s supporters: a leading state architect and the Rhode Island Painters Union.
In 2018, amidst the disarray of local organizations, then-Mayor Jorge Elorza dealt the project a blow by vetoing a zoning workaround necessary for its construction. In order to realize his colossus, Fane had flouted Parcel 42’s zoning ordinance which mandated a height maximum of 100 feet in the zone. Elorza cited the “[dramatic] impact” that the Fane tower would have on the Providence skyline as a reason to exercise his veto. Drama soon erupted when a sizable contingent of infuriated Councilmembers mobilized to override Elorza’s veto with a two-thirds vote. Once christened by a local tabloid as the “most powerful woman in Rhode Island,” Councilwoman Mary Kay Harris provided the decisive swing vote. She notably supplemented her decision with a circumspect reply to her constituents’ possible displeasure: “I believe my report card will show that I did the right thing and worked for the best interests of my community.”
Despite his blessing from the city, Fane stumbled in the face of community opposition. In 2019, Jewelry District neighbors took him to the Rhode Island Superior Court, challenging again the legality of the building’s height. Fane triumphed, but the neighbors upped the ante and took him to the state Supreme Court. Still, all five justices upheld the lower court’s decision, ruling that the city had the power to modify its zoning ordinances. Developers then flubbed several deadlines, finding a sound excuse in the COVID-19 pandemic to delay construction until “normal economic activity resume[d].”
In January 2023, the I-195 Commission convened to criticize Fane’s design, citing “potentially dangerous wind effects.” (If its failure to comply with community agreements wasn’t enough, the Fane Tower could topple and crush Xaco Taco and Seven Stars Bakery). In March 2023, facing persistent opposition and design uncertainty, Fane abandoned Rhode Island aspirations. Commission chair Marc Crisafulli relayed the developer’s final message: the Fane Organization would discontinue the project due to “recent risk factors outside of [their] control.”
UNREWARDED RISKS
Long before the Fane Tower, a litany of abandoned structures saturated Rhode Island, from nondescript mill buildings to the Cranston Street Armory to, most notoriously, the Superman Building. Vacant for just over a decade, Superman mirrors the Fane project in how it underscores the misaligned priorities of city politicians hellbent on grand investments that overlook the needs of low-income Rhode Islanders and the state’s ever-increasing unhoused
population. According to the latest count conducted by the RI Coalition to End Homelessness in January, over 1,800 people in Rhode Island are experiencing homelessness, a staggering number that has grown 65 percent since 2020.
An October 2022 deal offered a $29 million tax cut to development company High Rock in exchange for transforming the Superman building into apartments. But the company had yet to sign a “letter of commitment” to the city and provide an official budget for the project. Instead, the developer perfunctorily toured the Superman Building in the company of Governor Dan McKee, performing what we can only imagine as a reciprocal eye-contact circle wherein real estate bigwigs measure each other up. Their tour has yet to result in any form of tangible financial commitment to the project, despite the state’s breathless fiscal encouragement. To borrow the words of local reporter Steve Ahlquist, who graciously responded to our clarifying questions about the Providence housing crisis, “it’s very easy for developers to claim poverty while sitting on tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.” Even if High Rock flies on time, its results—20 percent ‘affordable’ units, which would actually range from $1,384 to $2,076 per month—promise little change for the almost 2,000 Rhode Islanders facing homelessness and the many more without sufficient protections against eviction.
Over in Pawtucket, a similar big-budget project lags. Developers for Tidewater Landing, a riverfront project to revitalize the city’s downtown with a soccer stadium as well as retail and residential development, recently communicated their failure to meet a self-imposed deadline to enumerate how they will find the tens of millions of dollars on top of their 37 million dollar tax break necessary to finance a now $125 million-dollar stadium. (Incidentally, the Rhode Island minor league soccer team has been slated to play their first season elsewhere.)
Brett Johnson, principal developer of the project, previously expressed his “confidence” to the Boston Globe about making up the deficit:
I am very confident that this project is going to transform Rhode Island. And I’m very proud of that. But I will tell you, it’s amazing to me— there’s a certainly incredible amount of people that seem to do everything possible to hold Rhode Island back.
As of August 9, the developer purportedly has the funds to make headway on Tidewater. Still, they’re lacking a development timeline and claim construction will begin some time in the “near future.”
Fane and its “wind effects” certainly represent the nth degree of developer arrogance, but, rather than an outlier, we suggest that Fane’s attitude is nothing more than an extreme at the end of a spectrum of developers who each want to elevate themselves, rather than raise up Rhode Islanders.
There is an exemplary supply of failed, risky development in Rhode Island—almost the basis of a legislative tradition—and yet very little evidence of lessons learned. This June marked
( TEXT KIAN BRAULIK, CORINNE LEONG, KABIR NARANAYAN, & JEAN WANLASS DESIGN RILEY CRUZCOSA ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY )the 11th anniversary of the collapse of 38 Studios, the video game company founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling that, upon closing its doors, left the state $150 million in debt. Rhode Island had essentially become an ‘angel investor,’ providing $75 million in bonds to lure Schilling over the Rhode Island border from his previous corporate offices in Boston, with hopes to create “hundreds of jobs.” Here too, an infusion of confidence failed to leverage the nation’s smallest state like a venture capital firm, or render the company’s first video game a home run. 38 Studios may be dead and buried, but like Schilling in Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series—bleeding through his sock, still pitching on—Rhode Island politicians seemingly haven’t stopped hoping that the city can be molded into a more prosperous economic machine. Whether that machine feeds off of a video game phenomenon or a luxury developer doesn’t matter: the same patterns repeat themselves.
Even if the state’s dramatic plans for 38 Studios, Superman, or had Fane come to fruition, most Rhode Islanders would almost certainly still face barriers to prosperity. That is to say, one lucrative development doesn’t spell investment influx, population growth, or further economic development but rather further cleavages on an already unequal playing field. According to community advocate Dwayne Keys in a previous interview about Superman with the College Hill Independent, “those who can afford to rent out units at $1,500–$2,000/month are going to be looking for properties in nearby areas with more economic opportunities, like Boston.”
Keys’ implication seems reasonable. If Rhode Island doesn’t have the resources to fill a luxury apartment building, why distract from the needs of its current citizenry, rather than outsource economic development to the will of prospective Boston emigrants? Indeed, while the state and other city councilors somnambulate to the pipe dream that ‘any development is good development,’ the coalition reminds us in their open letter during Fane’s development process that “many of our families have to decide whether to eat or pay rent.” A lack of investment in safe and stable housing for low-income Rhode Islanders stands in stark contrast to the enthusiasm doled out to developers of luxury housing projects by councilmembers and the state legislature.
That’s not to mention how the state’s largest corporations, Brown
in commercial success of game releases.”
This cautionary statement from the past feels especially prescient amid the current municipal mood: one lacking stability, let alone confidence. If talk of failure is already in the mouths of our senators, maybe High Rock and Tidewater weren’t worth betting on in the first place. We can say confidently today, Fane certainly wasn’t.
IN BED WITH MEDS AND EDS
In keeping with the national trend, mortgage rates and rents in Rhode Island are spiking. Nearly 34 percent of Rhode Island households are housing cost-burdened, with a significant fraction of them spending over half their annual income on housing costs. Rhode Island also has no rent-stabilization policy, meaning that landlords can raise rent whenever a tenant renews their lease, sometimes at only a month’s notice. With the end of the pandemic-era eviction moratorium, city officials see little hope for these numbers decreasing in the short term. Just this August, the city cleared yet another homeless encampment on Charles Street. Such an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach lays bare the apathy with which the state treats the rights and dignity of unhoused community members.
Unfortunately, despite once being an opportunity to heal the scars of urban renewal, the I-195 redevelopment land has been taken up to vigorously push a ‘meds and eds’ plan in which Brown University and its properties play a vital role. This trickle-down economic vision fails to address not only historic injustices but also the present-day privation of Providence’s residents to which Brown University’s tax-exempt status contributes. Meds and eds, the idea that the foundation and expansion of universities and hospitals will promote economic flourishing, has received criticism. According to a Bloomberg analysis from the Journal of Economic Geography, in 2008 an increase in ‘meds and eds’ employment is “uniformly negatively associated with nearly every single important measure of regional economic performance: income, economic output per capita, and high tech industry concentration.” This is relatively intuitive. Higher education relies on courting potential students usually from out-of-area (à la Brown), while the medical sector relies on the labor of highly-trained specialists. It’s not borne out that meds and eds raise up a municipality’s poorest population. Rather than revitalize a city, they seem to stratify.
Owing to current economic and demographic trends—impending job losses in Rhode Island’s medical sector, a decline in the use of physical office spaces, and the relatively rigid state population—affordable housing is imperative. In an interview with the Indy over the phone, public advocate Sharon Steele warned us against hasty comparisons between Fane, High Rock, and Tidewater. She assured us that Jason Fane is uniquely Dickensian in his evil, an egomaniacal Manhattanite intent on circumventing procedure for the sake of his own ‘transformative’ legacy, rather than the interests of Rhode Islanders. His haughty demeanor certainly doesn’t help.
University included, are at best indifferent to and, at worst, actively incentivizing grandiose development. When journalist Matt Bai surveyed the wreckage of 38 Studios’ Rhode Island plans for the New York Times, he noted a few projects which aligned with state leaders’ development hopes, among which was Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School’s relocation to the Jewelry District. Ten years later, Brown remains invested in its settlement on the I-195 parcel. According to Dean of the Warren Alpert Medical School Dr. Mukesh K. Jain:
“We want Rhode Island to be a place where cutting-edge research is happening in a way that [...] garners interest from biotech and biopharma partners and advances the health and economic vibrancy of the local community in a kind of positive feed-forward loop.”
In this spirit, the last few years have seen Brown acquire multiple footholds in the Jewelry District, including the River House residential building. Built using $9.2 million in state subsidies, its 174 units overlooking the murky depths of the Providence River will house only Brown graduate students.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has already hinted at possible fallout from the current development cycle: “If the Superman building deal falls apart… and if the soccer stadium in Pawtucket also falls apart, then I think that’s going to be tough for both cities.” As Bai reports, while 38 Studios was operational, the company’s portfolio manager emailed Curt Schilling, “I don’t think I can support a $75 million guarantee to any single company in [the video game] industry due to the wide volatility
Steele mentioned a meeting between herself and Jason Fane amid negotiations for the development, during which he offered to put Rhode Island on the map. She replied, “Roger Williams did that in 1636,” to which he decided to promptly walk out on her. Save for Fane’s hubris, though, we want to respectfully disagree with Steele’s diagnosis. Rhode Island politicians consistently defer to developers and, in perfect accordance with procedure, still overlook the underserved. Very few affordable housing projects have emerged in Rhode Island despite big-development disappointment, while housing justice organizations continue to fight for rent stabilization and a tenant’s bill of rights. With no end to the housing crisis in sight, there isn’t time to waste on the empty promise of sweeping transformation.
KIAN BRAULIK B’24.5, KABIR NARAYANAN B’24, & JEAN WANLASS B’25 can see Block Island from up here.“It’s very easy for developers to claim povery while sitting on tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.”
– Steve Ahlquist
RUG
A rhetorical analysis
BERN
( TEXT KIAN BRAULIK DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY )AT THE COLUMBUS THEATER
On August 27, U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders trekked some three-hundred miles to Federal Hill’s Columbus Theatre to endorse former member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives Aaron Regunberg for Congress. Regunberg enjoyed additional endorsements from Councilmember Sue AndeBois, president of the Association of Flight Attendants Sara Nelson, and, last but not least, singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton.
Sanders’s endorsement brought additional attention to what might have been an innocuous election on the national stage. Throughout the rally, Sanders et al echoed the talking point that, since RI-01 is a deep-blue district, why not aim for a solidly progressive candidate? His endorsement suggested Aaron’s viability not only as “someone who will push the button” (the rally speakers’ turn-of-phrase for “vote along Democratic Party lines”) but also as a member of the House’s ever-growing progressive coalition. This was all much too optimistic for my taste, and voters agreed. Despite progressive hopes, Regunberg lost to former Biden staffer Gabe Amo on September 5. His failure clarified that big-name progressive endorsements don’t necessarily guarantee success, even in deep-blue districts.
Speaking after Sanders’ spirited rallying cry, Regunberg trotted out likewise progressive talking points—support for Medicare for All, prison reform, and a wealth tax—each boding well for agenda-setting as the Congressional Progressive Caucus grows ever larger, now boasting 103 members. Still, as 2008’s “Hope” becomes 2016’s “Not Me, Us” becomes 2023’s “A Better World Is Possible,” it’s difficult not to blush at rhetoric like “hope is a commitment to searching for possibilities,” an aphorism that Aaron repeated twice for emphasis during his allotted portion on the 27th. I felt so unmoved by that call to action, one yet again bent on an appeal to hope. I thought, I must’ve blinked in my ballot box on March 3, 2020, and woke up at the Regunberg-Sanders rally, spirited away from the Golden to the Ocean State.
In my time-warp I neglected to understand how indifferent I would feel to imbibe hope as the progressive rhetorical line four years later. While those four years were stymied by inaction on climate change, a stagnant minimum wage, and backsliding on reproductive rights, the rhetoric has remained remarkably consistent. In perfect parallel, a Biden endorsement beat a Sanders endorsement in a primary. Hope rings as hollow as ever.
ASA REGUNBERG ’23
At the rally, Regunberg’s rhetoric didn’t necessarily eschew confidence that hope is a commitment to searching for possibilities. Instead, he described hope as a compulsory strategy. In order to instill hope in the crowd, he invoked his two-year-old son Asa. Regunberg feels terrified that Asa has grown up in a world without clean air quality—skies blotted out with smoke, all too normal. Even though our candidate mussed with worry, he saw reflected in his son a duty to right these wrongs, sights set on nothing less than the Capitol.
Almost twenty years ago, critical theorist Lee Edelman introduced his quintessential attack against rhetorical appeals to children’s futures. In his seminal book No Future, he
argues that ‘think of the children’ idioms damage political discourse for how they essentialize given lines of argumentation as unequivocally humane. Since children aren’t political agents, it’s up to us to ensure their futures. Who would purport to oppose a politics that prioritizes anyone before our most vulnerable?
Such ‘self-evident’ one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. The Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought.
It’s disheartening to recognize how even the most progressive political rhetoric rests on the happiness of the Child. In its very evocation, hope reveals its own underbelly—the idea that the future may only be worth it for the children, not the alive adults. Regunberg’s wife Katie, who carried Asa onstage, incidentally received only a cue to enter. Asa got an entire section of Aaron’s speech.
Rhetorics of hope don’t include adults (you’d never hear think of the twentysomethings, let alone the thirtysomethings, fortysomethings, and on and on ad infinitum). Progressives critique conservative rhetoric for its fearmongering but readily assent to similar strategies, albeit with an altogether, more-benevolent ethos. Still, it’s the Child whose well-being progressives bear into the future, and present injustices—the broken criminal justice system or the exponentially exacerbating climate crisis—become unworthy of amelioration for their injustice alone. They become worth ameliorating for how they compromise our paragons of intergenerational ‘progress.’ Left or right, America the sandbox is still up-in-arms about its children.
This political rhetoric isn’t just frustrating in a theoretical vacuum, though. Rather, it implies a fundamental dehumanization to the way we talk about crises. Climate justice becomes worthy because it prevents child lung disease, but discourses about ‘prison reform’ don’t even reference human subjects. Not once at the Regunberg-Sanders rally did the end solitary confinement reference justice for the incarcerated. They, unlike the Child, carry baggage which deprives them of full humanity—here, represented by inclusion in collectivizing rhetoric. Even on the Bernie left, our political imagination has an asymptote that excludes everyone from people without kids, to addicts, to anyone who has committed a violent crime.
HOPELESS AFTER ALL
This myopic investment in the fate of the Child was reciprocally perpetuated by another one of Sanders’ more questionable talking points from August 27: the idea that workers should be given control of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence. Both narratives work by leveraging the supposed inevitability of a
future: one in which the Child will grow up and the other where AI must continue to develop, unrestricted.
Taking these inevitabilities for granted, Sanders drew a distinction between corporations wielding artificial intelligence versus artificial intelligence being placed in the hands of working people: “you can look at the new technologies and say, ‘wow, we are going to see a significant increase in worker productivity and it is going to be workers who benefit from that increased productivity!’” Again, this policy proposal doesn’t take into account whether automation ought to be regulated, something unforeseeable from a techno-optimistic worldview. Rather than take critically the role of technology in mediating our present social and economic circumstances, AI must be borne into the future rather than critiqued for its potentially destabilizing place in the present.
This narrative wherein novel technologies must pass into the hands of working people hasn’t been brought about. Such a project would require both mass education in computer science as well as an ethical directive that the average person not ‘misuse’ a technology as precarious as AI. Despite the fact that the working class hasn’t so much as seen control over the assembly line in America, it’s become more efficacious for the left to spout opaquely about worker ownership over artificial intelligence than risk condemning cutting-edge technology qua technology. The boundaries of Regunberg’s rhetoric which foregrounds the Child also excludes any policies that don’t subscribe to the myth of limitless economic growth.
It’s been almost 4 years since Super Tuesday, 2020. Back then, living through the historic success of a progressive candidate on the national stage, I thought that I’d have another opportunity to see a Sanders rally, maybe in Oakland or San Francisco. My friends and I had bought tickets to a Daniel Ellsberg speech in March of 2020 and harangued a small coalition of student debaters and activists to invite a progressive for CA-08 to speak at our high school. The COVID-19 pandemic cheated us out of those Orpheum tickets. Our inoffensive liberal incumbent won his primary. Then and now progressive rhetoric turns a sparse harvest.
Regunberg lost despite garnering even heftier Washington endorsements since the Sanders rally—namely, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in the Boston Globe, Amo’s “likability” won the day, outpacing Regunberg in Pawtucket, Barrington and Cumberland. Progressive losses like these go to show we need more than inspiring rhetoric to make it to the Capitol.
B’24.5 is making their way downtown, walkin’ fast.
Apocalypse Now
2012 and the approaching end of the world
→ At the end of the aughts, a conspiracy theory began gaining traction that the world would end sometime on or around December 21, 2012, a Friday. The date in question marked the end of the 13th Bak’tun in the Mayan Long Count calendar, a cyclical pattern that had lasted around 5,125 years. Rather than enter the 14th Bak’tun, the doomsday theory claimed, this time the world would come to an end.
The means by which this apocalypse might occur were as vague as its supposed cause. One popular ‘scientific’ theory asserted that the Sun would align with the center of the Milky Way, unleashing a massive gravitational event between the Sun and the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* which would wipe out a conveniently placed Earth. Another predicted that a large solar flare would trigger a geomagnetic reversal, which in turn would unleash immense quantities of energy onto the Earth.
There was no scientific basis for any of these theories—yet the myth stuck. An Ipsos poll conducted in 2012 reported that one in ten people globally agreed with the statement that “the Mayan calendar, which some say ‘ends’ in 2012, marks the end of the world”—a significant number of believers. As a nine-year-old, I had learned enough elementary school science to know that the world would likely not suddenly collide with an until-now invisible planet. But when December 21st rolled around, I remember sitting on a plane and wondering if I would ever see land again.
It was almost as if people wanted to believe in the end of the world, misrepresenting and conflating Mesoamerican timekeeping, astronomical phenomena, and New Age spirituality in order to reach that conclusion. The apocalypse felt as if it was just around the horizon, and people wanted it to stay.
Years prior, Hollywood had already seen potential in the approaching apocalypse. Sony-Columbia’s Roland Emmerich-directed picture, aptly titled 2012, was released in 2009, capitalizing on the growing wave of rumors surrounding the December date. The film, although panned by critics, was an unmitigated commercial success, grossing over $750 million worldwide despite being a nearly three-hour-long action-adventure slugfest.
It’s hard to say how much of 2012’s success was related to the fear around the specific 2012 phenomenon or whether it merely capitalized on a familiar trope. Cinematic representations of the apocalypse have long held a spot in Hollywood’s blockbuster arsenal—RKO’s Deluge was made all the way back in 1933. More contemporarily, Armageddon and The Core present ‘natural’ ends of the world (rather than aliens, nuclear, viruses, etc.).
Of course, Hollywood did not invent the end of the world—our lingering preoccupation with it is perhaps the oldest story that humanity has told itself. Eschatology, the branch of theology that deals with death, judgment, and finality, can be found at the heart of almost every religious system. If the world began somewhere, the logic goes, so must it end.
But for as long as humans have imagined the apocalypse, the tangible possibility of an actual end of the world has remained distant. Theological ends often take place in the distant past or atemporal future. And popular narratives of the apocalypse hold a distinct sheen of outlandishness, inciting shock and awe rather than full-on terror.
It is hard to say the same with regard to climate change: over the past couple of centuries, humans have managed to write—and now execute—a step-by-step instruction manual on how the world will end.
TEXT DANIEL ZHENG DESIGN SIMON YANG ILLUSTRATION LIVIA WEINER )The apocalypse has moved out of the realm of fiction or mythology, into the very reality of the earth’s rising temperature. One no longer has to imagine the apocalypse, because here it is, right in front of us. +++
Eleven years after the world failed to end, humanity finds itself closer than ever to its demise. The overwhelming scientific consensus appears to proclaim that the end—as initiated by human-caused climate change—is an inevitability, not a possibility.
Of course, things are not quite this simple. Because can we necessarily say that climate change amounts to something akin to the so-called ‘end of the world’? Any declaration of the ‘end of the world’ or the ‘apocalypse’ is ideologically charged, carrying with it a whole host of preconceptions revolving around what delineates both the ‘world’ and its ‘end.’ In one breath, the ‘end of the world’ might suggest the end of a way of life, the end of humanity, the end of the earth, the end of the universe as a whole, or even the end of ‘reality’ as such. Each of these ‘ends’ at once includes and excludes, each divides and segments the ‘world’ in its own way.
But amidst this contradiction, the unceasing march of climate change seems to represent the ‘end of the world’ in one or many of these senses. Efforts to mitigate the climatic disaster have been outright failures—eight years after the Paris Agreement, none of the world’s top polluters have complied with the pledges they agreed to, and appear unlikely to suddenly change tack. Once global temperature rises past a certain threshold, climatic changes will spiral out of our control.
But, crucially, we can’t be sure when, how, and where the end will strike. The apocalypse looms, but the way in which it will appear to us is anything but obvious. The end of the world is never so clean. +++
We might imagine the apocalypse as a large bang, an instantaneous collapse where the earth explodes and everyone and everything goes with it. But the world is more likely to go out in a chorus of whimpers, relatively speaking: a series of local crises that snowball until that ‘world’ no longer exists.
After all, while we might imagine a temperature increase that spreads equally across the globe, the effects of climate change can only manifest themselves on a local scale, necessarily distributed unevenly across the planet. A uniform rise in sea level, for instance, will ravage low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu or the Maldives far before it impacts higher elevations.
However, filmic representations assert that the apocalypse democratizes: everyone is in the same boat, so to speak. And the very same thing is happening in contemporary climate discourse, with the media appealing to an all-encompassing ‘we.’ ‘We’ are all in this together, now that the very survival of a universal humanity is at risk.
But this democratizing narrative is too easy; we all might be in the same boat, figuratively, but how one gains entry onto that boat (speaking now of the large ark that makes up a significant portion of the third act of 2012) is of course still dictated by wealth and power.
Disappearing coastlines are less devastating for those who can uproot their lives and move elsewhere. A North-shifting climate and extreme weather events are leaving those who depend on agriculture for their livelihood empty-handed. In the most extreme case, the rich and powerful have the option of escaping the earth itself by fleeing into space, at least temporarily.
Even when representations of the apocalypse acknowledge their inherent inequalities, they maintain a myth of individual exceptionalism. In 2012’s final act, despite the fact that tickets to the life-saving arks cost €1 billion, our scrappy writer-turned-protagonist Jackson is able to sneak on. For the millions who don’t make it onto the ark, their ‘world’ might have ended, but for the sake of the apocalypse film audience, the world marches on.
The fact that we derive hope or optimism from the individual surviving despite the hordes of unnamed casualties in these stories reinforces the appeal that the apocalypse narrative makes to a unified humanity. The millions dead mean less to the audience than the comfort that a certain few will continue to survive, carrying on the lineage of humanity. The calls for the “preservation of the species,” as in 2012, reinforce these narratives of human history as a project of
teleological progress.
But the priority that is given here to ‘humanity’ as a unified, linear enterprise proceeding in one direction (‘progress’) reinforces a narrative of Western imperialism—one in which ‘humanity’ has never included everyone. Relevant here is the work of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte, who argues that the destructive forces of colonialism have already constituted an “end of the world” for many Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism, through both physical violence and epidemic disease, brought mass death and forced displacement for innumerable people and their ways of being. Whyte quotes Larry Gross, who asserts as such: “Native Americans have seen the end of their respective worlds.”
There is an ontological sameness of the end here, where the end as forecasted by climate change is not anything different from end(s) that have already occurred. Robin Wall Kimmerer finds in this similarity a sort of déja vu, reflecting on how colonial destruction has long been disfiguring ecosystems. She asserts, “Once again, we are in a situation of forced climate change adaptation.” For these Indigenous scholars, the local end takes priority over the global end, because the global end clings to a mythology in which the world is divided and yet affected ‘equally.’
I find it profoundly ironic that the 2012 panic took its inspiration from a supposedly ancient Mayan calendar that the modern world was only just ‘re-discovering,’ one of perhaps the only contemporary Western pop-cultural moments where a Mayan event has reached the fore. Apart from this moment, it is as if the Maya themselves suffered an “end of the world” as Whyte outlines it.
Despite this, the Maya live on. Fragmented across modern political borders of Latin America, Maya Indigenous culture and peoples endure. “Indians survived the apocalypse,” Gross continues. Even when the apocalypse strikes with totalizing force, we might still hesitate to call it ‘the end’—no matter which way you look at it, a people and a way of life have continued.
+++
At first glance, apocalyptic fiction clings to the impossible neatness of the end, resting on the conceit of the end of the world as a given. Save the opening minutes of political machinations, nobody in 2012 questions the empirical fact that the world is ending once fireballs begin raining from the sky.
But in 2012, as in other apocalypses, the world rarely ‘ends’ in a way that wraps things up in a nice bow, perhaps because the narrative of the apocalypse is always fraught with loopholes—defining ‘the end of the world’ remains an ideological undertaking. We might think about the paradigm of apocalyptic fiction as instead something of a consolatory genre. Within the boundaries of the apocalyptic narrative, the end is not quite the end at all, but becomes a framework for either a heroic rescuing of the world (e.g. Armageddon) or at the very least salvation for its central figures (2012). “The end,” 2012’s trailer proclaims, “is just the beginning.”
Even the Book of Revelation, the Christian Bible’s most extreme apocalypse, maintains a central conceit that the devastation of Earth serves a purpose—namely, to purge the evil that has accumulated on the earth and mark Jesus’ return. Revelation is less an end than the inception of a “New Jerusalem” in which the worthy live on in paradise.
The apocalypse, then, is a sort of fake-out, a prophetic end that refuses to go all the way. Each time, whether it be through humanistic heroism or divine intervention, the ideological subtext
of these narratives chips away at the notion that any radical end is truly possible. The end is just the beginning.
+++
In his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman suggests a deceptively simple thought experiment—if humans were to disappear off of the face of the planet today, what would happen to the earth?
We might not think of Weisman’s thought experiment as the end of the world, given that the world by all accounts seems to proceed in the absence of humans. Nature reclaims the built environment, vegetation flourishes, and the earth returns to the primordial forest of an earlier age.
But speaking as humans, this spontaneous disappearance of humanity does in fact seem to produce a truly radical end, to the extent that we can only process the world from the perceptual apparatus of our human existence. As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Vivieros de Castro discuss in their book The Ends of the World, what makes Weisman’s “world without us” so radical is that for the experiment to work, we have to place ourselves into a world in which we don’t exist—a process that creates a rift between the world we are in now and the “radically other” world that Weisman attempts to create.
The unstoppability of climate change, a
scientists hypothesize that the universe— not just the ‘world’—will come to an end. This theory, known as the heat death of the universe, suggests that a gradual buildup in entropy will lead to a point at which everything becomes evenly distributed—a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
Humanity will almost certainly be long gone. Heat death constitutes a secular eschatology that has little to do with judgment or death, given that there are no (longer) subjects to judge or be judged, or to kill and die. Only finality remains, a finality marked by indefinite equilibrium and inaction.
Unlike the end of the world via fiery armageddon, people don’t write narratives about the heat death of the universe because there is nothing to write about—the world, or universe, will simply, radically, end. Heat death’s inevitability refuses the form of apocalypse fiction, because there is no way through it. The distinction between a local or global end is superseded by the end of the universe itself—an end that swallows up the very possibility of dividing and segmenting space and time. It is the end of the end, not merely that which leads to a new beginning— the final apocalypse from which there is no coming back.
What heat death presents us with is the knowledge that our expiration is nothing new. Climate change did not invent the end, it merely shifted the scale of its time.
But living with the knowledge of our eventual extinction in 10106 years has not stopped us from acting upon the world that we inhabit right now. Neither should our knowledge that action relative to climate change likely will not change the course that our world is hurtling toward.
process that we began, has placed us in front of this “radically other” end. Humanity, in the words of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, is no longer merely a biological entity but has become a “geophysical force capable of destabilizing the boundary parameters of its own existence.” And so Weisman’s narrative, despite nature’s flourishing, portrays the ‘end of the world’ insofar as the world still requires our presence to be comprehensible.
The world, in turn, necessitates our presence too. A world “without us” would be a world that entirely disregards the very real relationships between humans and the world that we inhabit, relationships that are entangled in such a way that we can’t so easily ‘remove ourselves’ from the equation. We cannot begin to imagine a world without us, not only because it exists outside of our perceptual apparatus but also because it exists outside that of other nonhuman entities.
In the world of 2012, we might instead frame Weisman’s experiment like this: what would happen if the camera, the central representational and narrative figure, were to disappear? We would be left behind with no ability to perceive the narrative, and thus no ability to follow our protagonists ‘beyond the end.’ Once we take the camera away, the end of the world in 2012 occurs equally for both the protagonists and the peripheral characters left behind by the narrative. Or, to put it another way—the end of the world in 2012 can only truly occur with the end of the film itself, a refusal of the apocalypse narrative before it even begins. +++
Somewhere in the unfathomably distant future (one estimate pegs it as 10106 years), many
Here, then, we might think about re-opening the space for narrative— not a narrative that asserts a universal humanity or end, but one that is attuned to the specificity of our world in the present moment. The innovation of apocalypse fictions like 2012 is, once again, that they crucially embrace the end of the world as a given. But rather than resorting to the loophole of a new beginning, we might instead embrace the impossibility of depicting the absolute end. Our inability to narrativize heat death should not induce paralysis, but instead presents another option—that we use the knowledge of the end as a way to narrate the present that we inhabit.
Some might call this addressing the symptoms, not the cause, of our predicament. But while this approach takes the end as an inevitability, it still deals in the life and death of eight billion people moving through the world. The fact that humanity has become an environmental force capable of destabilizing the earth should not change the fact that we still can act upon ourselves as well.
Narrative, rather, should take a page from Whyte’s book and focus on the presenttense of the world that we live in, the way it constantly changes, rather than find itself impeded by the immobilization of the end. As Whyte writes: “Indigenous peoples do not always approach the climate crisis as an impending future to be dreaded.” Climate change is here, right now, and so are its effects. And so our stories, too, should narrate what is happening to real people—who, in spite of the present closeness of the end, continue and will continue to live and move through the world.
“The apocalypse is thus always fictional, an end of the world that ‘ends’ in conceit alone. ”
Bites On Translation
to place, writer to reader.
DEATH & MARIGOLDS
Death anniversaries never occurred to me until I dated a person with a dead father. As January 29 approached, Sam explained to me that a peculiar depression was overtaking him, a subconscious tree in his brain aching in rooted memory. He coped with the sadness by calling it a reminder of his everlasting love.
Where I’m from in Los Angeles, the streets are lined with marigolds every October. Día de los Muertos. It celebrates life by accepting death. When I thought of what I wanted to give to Sam, how I wanted to say I acknowledge this, marigolds were the first thing to come to mind.
I began at Armstrong's Nursery, just up the street from my childhood home. The floors were paved with red adobe. I passed a shelf of ladybugs trapped in ice cream pints, captured for their eventual release into a meadow of aphids. I asked two employees if they had marigolds, and both said no, they aren’t in season. This was a funny idea to me: did that mean death was out of season too?
Ralph’s had a floral display just outside of the dairy aisle. I had forgotten a sweater. Suburban mothers rolled their carts by my shivering hands as I sifted through the buckets of flowers: tulips, roses, hyacinth, but no marigolds. It was January; the only flowers selling were those that could pervade the unforgiving death of winter, bulbs that dove and dug until they found warmth. However poetically just, I needed marigolds. It was the only way I could understand death. Finally, I found a small few, tucked away behind some lilies, as if reserved for mourners. I bought them and drove home to write an accompanying letter for Sam.
GONZALO ÁLVAREZ GARCÍA, DUN JIAN CHIN, DRI de FARIA, & LILY SELTZ SOFIA SCHREIBER )
I began: when I think of my abuela passing in a hospital, I imagine her in a room full of marigolds. Her soft white hair rests on the pillow, providing a background for sun bursting out of the orange spheres. That is how I see your father too. By the time I reached the third sentence, I realized I was writing in Spanish. I was writing a condolence letter in a language Sam couldn’t understand. What was the point in that?
This was not our first untranslatable schism. His father was a Lutheran Korean pastor, and mine is a Catholic Hispanic filmmaker. One day, when he tried to explain a Korean word to me, his explanation sounded like throwing darts at a word. It consistently missed the bullseye, the core meaning. I accepted there were things I would never understand.
I kept writing the letter in Spanish. The words ran out of me. Estoy tratando de ver a tu padre, en un cuarto lleno de caléndulas. This was how the love wanted to present itself. The understanding I had through imagining my abuela was now channeling into him, untranslatable.
In this way, I only understand death through marigolds, and marigolds through my abuela, and my abuela through Spanish. I labored over the letter, now a page long, trying to translate it back into English for him—but it was a different letter now. My condolences and care were offered in all of the books I’d read and the words my English-speaking mother said to me about death. I hoped he’d understand: I even Google-translated his father’s name into Korean and carefully wrote out the hangul in spaced-out, grossly incorrect formatting.
As I placed the letter on his doorstep on the morning of the anniversary, I fixed the marigolds above it. Then, I saw it: the marigolds’ soft folds of orange petals were wavy, not circular. They were carnations. Another moment lost in translation.
LEGALESE
In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, I started volunteering at New Sanctuary Coalition, a now-defunct New York organization that supported immigrants and their families as they navigated the legal system. My initial role was as a Spanish/English interpreter at their pro se legal clinic. I worked with clients to fill out intake forms and the i-589.
Within my first few days on the job, it became quickly clear that I would not just be translating between English and Spanish. I’d also be translating between what I might call the language of people and the language of the law. (Or the language of the state, or, to refine the point, the language of the white establishment.)
A successful asylum application tells a story in which the applicant faced particular types of harm in their home country and was forced to flee. The translator is therefore tasked with constructing a ‘coherent’ narrative out of accounts that often resist a neat linear form—especially when they center trauma, which often impedes a victim’s ability to construct or recall the chronology and specifics of an event. The i589’s language is fundamentally incompatible with that reality: “You must provide a detailed and specific account of the basis of your claim” it reads. “To the best of your ability, provide specific dates, places, or descriptions about each event or action described.”
Specifically, the i589 is interested in stories of harm in six categories.
plaster that they used to ‘fix’ these exit wounds turns white over time— but our walls are pink.
Even though gay has been lodged into our lexicon, it has become clear to me that this specific understanding of queerness is not local to me. I have realized that throughout my life, I have assimilated to the understanding of white queer normativity that characterizes most of American gay male culture—despite having lived in Mexico my entire life. An understanding that is elitist, exclusionary, and has hierarchized politics where non-white bodies are made invisible. An understanding that made me feel like my brown skin contradicted my queer body. An understanding that made me feel like my queerness boiled down to my libido and desirability. An understanding that made me feel like I was walking a tightrope between languages, between identities. I realized that even though we say “gay,” we don’t necessarily translate what queerness means personally. What would happen if meanings started to change instead of just words, if words had multiplicities instead of flatness? Maybe then our plaster would stay pink.
What would queerness mean to me if the language of my love was vernacular?
MIND YOUR (MOTHER) TONGUE
These categories, though sterile, form the basis of an applicant’s entire legal case. Never once did a client say to me, whether in Spanish or English, that they were applying for asylum because of their “membership in a particular social group.” As I translated, I learned to keep an eye out for key phrases that could be approximated in legalese. Instead of “my husband hit me,” I would write down: “persecution related to status as a woman.” Instead of “a group of men came to my home and told me they would kill my children,” I would write, “threats of violence as a result of the family’s political position.” Every time I did something like this, and ran it by the client, I would wince.
In 2019 and 2020, the asylum acceptance rate for pro se applicants was 13 percent. Even if the figure had been much higher, to do anything but try to persuade the court to grant an application would have been morally indefensible. But if persuading the court meant speaking its language, that meant asking clients to translate their own stories into a language that was not their own and which was not created to serve them. To encourage and facilitate that translation felt like an act of violence—like I was participating in a legal process already full of alienation and an unwillingness to hear, to really listen. There was already enough imprecision in the Spanish-to-English shift. But so much worse was the task of fitting lives into check-boxes—of forcing the round or ragged edges of human experience into the rigid space available for the client to ‘explain themselves.’
Another article might focus on how 63 percent of asylum seekers don’t manage to find lawyers—the best-trained and most effective translators between person-to-person vernacular and the language of the state—or how depressing it is that NSC gladly accepted a fifteen-yearold volunteer translator like me, with unpolished Spanish and breathtaking naïveté. But ultimately we don’t just need more translators. We need the state to speak the language of its people (and I’m hard-pressed to think of a time where it has prioritized that project) or it needs to get out of the business of determining who ‘belongs.’ -LS
WHITE PLASTER
There's no word for gay in Mexico.
“Sodomy” was the term used to describe the ‘nefarious sin’ (sex between men) during our colonial period, and “homosexual” was coined in the later half of the 19th century to diagnose a same-sex ‘sexual affliction.’ During the 20th century, terms such as joto, puto, and marica became colloquially popular. However, these words reflect the pejorative history of, and the systems of power regarding, queerness in Mexico. These words hold no agency; they’re epithets birthed to stifle, affiliating queerness with sin, disease, and humiliation.
So it's no surprise that since the latter half of the 20th century, socially emancipated queer people in Mexico have rejected using these terms to self-identify. There was no word for gay in our cities. Faced with a lack of self-denominated, nuanced language, we adopted the term used by our northern neighbors in liberation riots—gay. No translation needed; the term was lodged verbatim into our conversations. Gay became the plaster that we spread over the exit wounds on our crucifix-infested walls.
And because of the last century’s race for development in the Global South, the Mexican government made changes like decriminalizing queerness and establishing marriage equality. Although we do not take these changes for granted, the understanding of this progress as absolute forgoes the lived experiences of ordinary people. Those who formulate these projects of manufactured culture love to build our homes but never stick around long enough to see if we want to live in them. What they don’t realize is that even though we did have gaps in our walls, the
Just over a year ago, Som-Mai Nguyen issued a stunning critique of fellow Vietnamese-American writer Ocean Vuong with her Astra Magazine article “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility." In the piece, Nguyen, while maintaining her sincere admiration for Vuong’s literary prowess, admonishes him for claiming undue authority as ambassador for the Vietnamese language (to white audiences). She writes, quoting from an interview by The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu with Vuong:
Vuong described his aunt’s horror at the “lexicon of American violence” addressed in his poem “Old Glory.” She found the violence of American idioms “totally foreign” because “in the Vietnamese context - and it might be similar to Chinese - words are like spells. If you talk about death, death visits you, so you don’t talk about death at the dinner table…” I am baffled that Vuong should so surely act as spokesperson in generalizing ethnic significance from her individual, initial response. In repeating these careless hypotheses, individuals within (and outside) the diaspora normalize essentialism and reinforce their authority to adjudicate authenticity.
Nguyen’s reproach of one of Asian America’s most celebrated cultural icons addresses an ironic contradiction in translation—attempts to bridge linguistic differences tend to reproduce, and even amplify, the spectacle of cultural distance. In many ways, the difficulty of one-to-one semantic conversion generates the very creative tension that distinguishes translation as an art, rather than a mechanical operation. Yet, translators frequently confront this lack of closure not only as a test of their abilities, but also as a question of cultural allegiance. For those of us who approach translation from a diasporic perspective, too often we uncritically stage antagonisms be tween our “mother tongues” and English as if to carry on anticolonial struggle in the very words we claim (and unclaim).
This is understandable. While bilingualism carries the pride of cultural retention, it also testifies to painful assimilation. “Renouncing” English, that colonial imposi tion upon our speech, appears to secure our moral integ rity. Nevertheless, insisting upon the essential opposition between our “native language(s)” and English too easily gives way to self-exoticism and ahistorical fantasies of a pristine cultural inheritance.
As Nguyen stresses, “extrapolating from orthographic coincidence” has become a tired cliché in diaspora writing. Offering up a platter of disparate concepts denoted by the same “mother tongue” word (“Nước means both water and country”) and deliberately conflating homophones to “(mis)understand something into existence” still elicit enthusiastic praise. Here, the futility of translation is located not in the cultural specificity of both languages, but rather in the evidently inarticulate nature of English. This apparent sophistication gap—English with its vulgar simplicity, Vietnamese with its elegant culturally-embedded wisdom—is championed as an indictment of colonial society. Such narrow logic leaves no room for the existence of creoles, pidgins, or even dialects. Instead, both languages are rendered lifeless and irreconcilable.
This stubborn outlook stems from misplaced priorities. The task of translation is not perfect substitution, but rather to facilitate dialogue. The remedy is therefore principled imagination. What radical possibilities emerge when we discard our ambition for seamless interchangeability, and instead embrace the uncertain ruptures that translation leaves exposed? When we accept hybridity as constituent to the translatory process, perhaps we might no longer agonize over loose threads of inequivalent meaning, but instead dream up new, liberatory designs into which their open ends can be woven together.
-DJC
Awe-inspired and amazed, you hurriedly scratch down a loose interpretation of the events unfolding. An anonymous mass of humanity pulsating with energy right before your very eyes. In about 5 minutes you’re seemingly done. Is it your best work? No. Not remotely. Not that it would matter anyway.
“This is for yourself,” you think triumphantly. How complete one feels, being in the presence of others.
The Inquisitors
→ Many things began in the classroom for the two of us so naturally, that was where the Question first emerged. The Question—which had weaved its way through many different years-turned-epochs and geographies-turned-nations, conceived by the most enterprising of politicians and coming to wrap its indelicate stranglehold upon the most illustrious of metropolises—now arrived as a generic and inconsequential 21st century curiosity. The Jewish Question, as one of us first posed it to the other, began with a poke, and a whisper, and two fourteen-year-old girls who wanted to know how the first humans understood how to have sex.
Liel looked Mira dead in the eye, and as she voiced the words, we were the perfect classmates, a pair who understood one another. “How did they know how to do it?” She was inquiring about intuition, before copulation became culture and language became the elucidating tool by which elders would articulate to their children the proper form for preserving generations. She was not remembering all the species who did exactly this on the long evolutionary road to humanity; she was thinking only about us. Liel’s Question arose because of a class discussion, during the first days of high school, on the procreative portrayals in that week’s Bible reading, or what we call Torah, or TaNaKh, or Chumash studies, anything that branded the book beyond the reality of its generic name. We were reading, or re-reading, some salacious narrative of Genesis. One of those stories whose prose omitted the details of sweat and pleasure but pounded into us its insistence on insemination, on gestation, on the birth pangs of a character who would be remembered, inculcating yes the person but more so that cycle of breeding into forever, the promise of offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky.
We left the Question lying there on the table, or rather splayed out between our two separate desks, its answer inconclusive. Here was our turn to articulate this immemorial wondering, and with this legacy what did we do but make it a bedroom biopolitics—the Jewish Question prodded and palpated, licked over, plied and pierced and drained of its pus, leaving us to interpret a domesticated relic. Not a Question of our fate, but a Question of our emergence. A Question of how we might come to be.
+++
In another classroom—years later, during our senior year—Liel asked the Question again, but this time we were talking about violence. The final project in a genocide studies class prompted us to explore the ideologies behind mass murder. Nearly every student’s project attested to the magnitude of loss, recounting events that had already resolved themselves into the vortexes of Wikipedia articles and digital photograph collections. But Liel wanted something different from the past. She wanted us to insert ourselves into what wasn’t, as of yet, anything like a genocide. She wanted us to conduct an invasion, to blast open the old rhetoric that had come to enrapture the present, to herald the negative of her original Question: “How do they know how to start killing again?”
This was the era of the semi-automatic assault rifle—famous for allowing white nationalists to rupture cataclysmic sums of human flesh—and the internet, where said white nationalists broadcasted their manifestos on free speech websites. This technological partnership compelled our own duo—like an investigative journalist, Liel latched on to phenomena, and like an academic, Mira cleaved her analysis to the inquiries of her friend. Ours was a school partnership, stimulated by exploration, by discourse, by the recognition that our petty lives were swept up within the eddies of something momentous. Lacking experience with military-grade machinery, we opted to frame our project around the second technology. Hate forums would behold our hungering for academic excellence: we would execute a stalking experiment, which someone with greater resources and legitimacy could later scale. We would begin with the chat boards for the pridefully vitriolic. These were unseen spaces, where dispersed people
could transcend geography and conventions of respectable speech—unregulated and flourishing coves of the dark web, mainstream social media sites rendered in the austerity of a photographic negative.
We would infiltrate. We would log onto those message boards and observe. We would blow up the bombers and bleed out the gunmen with our scrupulousness. We would reach inward, shoring up a repository of answers from within those adamant siloes of negative.
When we shared the intentions for our project with our teacher, he expressed hesitation. What was the point? What could it achieve? Wasn’t this idea, this unorthodox and unacademic proposal, well, err, dangerous? We expected such a reaction, but were nonetheless committed to our desires—to bear witness to the substantial, to understand the incomprehensible, to jumpstart our entrance into the realm of life experiences. These people, hiding out in the cruel caves of virtual space until they emerged guns blazing into the light of day, we recognized them: they were the doors to that tantalizing prospect known as the real world. +++
Since this was still the early days of alt-right social media, we had few prospective subjects for our research. Gab was the only reasonable choice, a social media platform recently famous for inspiring a shooting at an American synagogue and an Australian mosque before that. The decision felt natural: we were Jews, we loved a good gabfest!
A few days after announcing our intentions to our teacher—when we did not get the green light, but nor did we get the red light—we sat in front of some lockers, Liel’s laptop balanced on Mira’s outstretched knees. Liel crossed and uncrossed her ankles and Mira tapped her heels against the floor as we waited for the page to load through the finicky Wi-Fi. When a sleek black overtook the computer screen, we leaned forward. Out of the colorlessness, something geometric emerged, a blur materializing into the green ovals and triangles of an illustrated frog face with a thin-lipped smile. Beside the frog, the word “gab” appeared in the same verdant shade of green. Beneath it, a hashtag: #SPEAKFREELY. Liel clicked, and a pop-up bounced forward from the black. We signed up with credentials that falsified our existence as a singular person endowed with the right to #SPEAKFREELY on the outskirts of Twitter. After a moment, we pressed “make my account.”
We blinked and entered the negative.
The crisp black wall remained, the background accentuating the columns of unvarnished speech. A long scroll of white boxes streamed down into a simulation of infinity, each containing another iteration of the standard commentary. Subsumed within the volume, we read the posts aloud, which assumed the collective tone of sixteen-year-old boys hunched over their video game consoles. These rants were rants, fantastic words; we were not remotely horrified—which seemed to be our perpetual state of existence, as we walked our school halls in a depressed daze and read the news with shocklessness. We let ourselves be waylaid here.
After an indeterminate number of minutes, we refocused our attention on taking screenshots, suffocating Liel’s desktop with images of
anything notably offensive and explosive. We only parsed through a few days’ worth of posts; the entire stream spanned months, a burgeoning thicket plotting its overgrowth in the years to come. We did not want to assert our presence on the site, only to excavate, so we left private messages. We clicked on the most recent poster on the main board, then opened the option to chat with him directly. At this point we hesitated, knowing that our project had always required slightly more than plain viewing. We did not want to say anything, but we wanted to solicit everything. After a bit of debate, we landed on our Question:
“What is our path for reproducing our shared vision for our homeland of America?”
We sent the Question to the famous accounts among the scroll, the ones with names that appeared in the media or the first results of a Google search. We did not revise the words. We did not Question our own capacity to Question. Instead, we closed the laptop, contenting ourselves with our first session in the digital black hole, the irresistible negative space eroding precious ground from the physical world and the mainstream media. Inside it, we would say nothing more because no one deigned to answer our Question. But we kept returning to that void, scavenging through lethal detritus for a buried answer we would not find. +++
Answers, sometimes buried and sometimes burrowed, were the perennial basis of our friendship. It wasn’t a best friendship, nor was it slated to be a long one—nothing like one of those famed platonic loves of womanhood— but it suited us. Like that prodding whisper in the classroom in the first months of high school, we leaned over ourselves to inquire about the things before us. Each of us would, when struck by an urgent concern, cross the halls to accost the other with whatever piece of news we felt was vital.
“Did you see the latest about the whistle-blower?” We were locked in a total obsession with an anonymous “senior member of the Trump White House administration” who had spontaneously taken to the editorial column of the New York Times, chronicling how he and his colleagues actively undermined the president in order to protect the country from his volatile incompetence. The night his Op-Ed dropped, the two of us called for over an hour, dissecting each unflinching phrase. For days, we texted one another with each expert theory on the whistle-blower’s identity; we debated with our teachers about the article’s potential for exploding any remaining semblance of White House cohesion; we discussed its implications for the approaching midterm elections. The torrents and torments of federal affairs felt close to us, felt like ours.
Our friendship remained for years in this stream of headlines exchange, our conversations consigned to the outskirts of our personal lives, subjects of ailing family members and sexual transgressions and perilous mental states, never quite converging upon any of it, and with our evasive elocution we fermented an abundant void, into which we cached the explicit questions and the honest answers that might otherwise arise a frightening intimacy between us. We tried to maintain an impersonal friendship, to see the other only as an inhabitant of the public sphere, interrogating our surroundings, placing them on trial.
Though we primarily side-chatted in class and texted incessantly, every few months we would hang out in a coffee shop or a park, experimenting with a relationship that might burgeon beyond school walls. One such day, while Mira gave Liel a ride home, our analysis turned arboreal. The trees on the curb beside us formed a suspiciously-shaped overhang— uniform, angular chunks were missing from each tree where it descended over the road. After verifying that the vanished streak of foliage was not a quirk of our imagination, we decided that these leaves and limbs were shorn
by some city department to facilitate the passage of buses and shipping trucks. Cargo, whether human or their possessions, traveled quickly and constantly in our city, demanding that the roads reconfigure their accouterments to indulge this restlessness. We decided right then, speeding along together encased in the freedom of a car, that our lives bowed to the supremacy of motion. We thought that if we talked enough, we would resist the tendency to become passive like those trees. If we did not move, we too would find our limbs sliced away into the negative space of memory.
+++
For a month, we clung to our project. For a month, we held out hope. Each morning began with a pre-class ritual: two desks pushed together, our project occupying the corner enclave of our history classroom, our teacher sipping his coffee, glancing at us between emails. Liel’s laptop balanced expertly over the imperceptible valley that remained between the two miniature tables. A charging cord dangled off one edge. We made an ordeal of ex-ing out of Liel’s ungodly sum of tabs; we did not want the distraction.
If our teacher ever breached the silence of his supervisory gaze and asked what we were doing over there, we assured him that we were “collecting evidence” for our final presentation. But upon confirming our dire lack of responses to our Question, we set about losing ourselves within the mayhem vortex.
As we descended into the negative, a flurry of screenshots called us back to the positive pursuit of our project. We were playing a zero-sum game with ourselves. Take a picture of this and this and this and this. Oh and this one too. What is this—no wait that one, what does that even mean, the one about AOC, no the other one about AOC, the one that says she hates the electoral college and would never send her kids there, the one that says it’s time to send the “queers to the camps,” so when they say “queers to the camps” do they mean they intend to build gas chambers here or ship people back to the broken relics of facilities on the other side of the ocean, or maybe they want to renovate the internment camps from last century, or the idea could be to pack and squeeze and slam everyone into the breathless containers of the detention camps at the border, you know I never understood why they say send all of us to the gas while they also say no one ever sent us to the gas in the first place, no I didn’t see that on a specific post I
was only thinking aloud, wait, you’re scrolling too quickly, you just passed it, you’re missing it, you’re missing it, we’re missing it, there—right there, take a picture of that post it’s perfect it captures everything we want to elucidate alleviate adjudicate the answer to all why’s as long as we don’t as ask how, or when, or where, we are not asking what we will do with all this, the salient details yes we disappear them down below us, a void is a plummeting place, we are deserting we are deserting we are deserting. The bell rang. Class. Regulated, curricular learning, always snatching us at the most inopportune time, the moment when our eyes had finally adjusted to the dark. One of us sighed and the other one groaned. Liel slammed her laptop and Mira wound up the charging cord. It always ended like this, us grounded mid-free fall, at which point we crossed the threshold out of the classroom, and in the hallway parted ways. Genocide studies was the only class we shared that year.
We kept returning to the website in the weeks and months that followed, our daily excuse to speak to one another. We went on with this routine each morning, well past our final presentation where we exhibited an array of our screenshotted findings, and though our attention and frequency eventually dwindled, we always reconverged upon those two conjoined desks. We knew our only goal now: not to document extremity, not to anticipate a future violence concocted by Gab’s collective, but to continue proliferating our mountain of screenshots, our abundance of conversation, approaching the asymptote that the void’s infinity scroll imposed against us and never, through the generations, converging upon its limit. The Question, the sleuthing, the forays into the void—this was our baby, our brainchild, our sacred act of reproducing ourselves without being told how to do it.
Riding With the Hermaphrodite Cowboy
Futuristic Transness in Early Science Fiction
( TEXT MAYA AVELINO DESIGN SARA HU ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ→ I am not the best babysitter. I have been known to fall asleep on the job and roam freely through fridges. I trained myself to wake up to the sound of a key turning in the door. But, when I was 16, one family kept hiring me back.
One evening, as I was watching Modern Family in the living room, the kids came back inside from playing. They told me, "We've just climbed into a dumpster, look what we found!”
They handed me a shoebox of odds and ends: a broken necklace, some colorful glass, a paperback. This book was battered and the cover was falling off, but you could still make out that it was one of those pulpy romance novels with a cowboy on the cover. But this wasn’t any ordinary cowboy, the cover insisted. He was the infamous Hermaphrodite Cowboy. The back cover espoused his sexiness and ability to please in any which way.
I told them to put that back in the trash.
The kids asked me what “hermaphrodite” meant. I thought, “Well, can I explain to them it's an out-of-fashion word for an intersex person that’s being used here in a sexual context?” And then I thought, “Maya, you are going to lose your job.” I told the kids to find something else to play with. So the Hermaphrodite Cowboy was left unexplained, lying at the top of the trash can.
At 16, I didn’t have the tools to explain that the book's appeal hinges on the cowboy’s non-adherence to binary gender. The topic felt inaccessible to me and too lewd. I was uncomfortable with how overtly sexual it was and how tied that sexuality was to his intersex identity. I couldn’t articulate that the text was an exercise in radically reimagining the Old American West and the archetype of the masculine this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-two-of-us trope. It dared to ask: what if the cowboy wasn’t a boy? And what if he was sexy?
Only now am I realizing the Hermaphrodite Cowboy is part of a long lineage of fiction that investigates and reimagines gendered embodiment. I have been working through Lisa Yaszek’s speculative fiction anthology, The Future is Female!, a collection of short stories from SciFi’s Golden Age, which ran from the 1940s to the late 1960s. The authors play with subverting norms of gender and sexuality. The texts are radical for their time, centering queer protagonists. These characters are never sidelined as exotic or treated as objects for the reader to encounter but are provided the full interiority that they deserve. I read one short story, “Another Rib,” by John Jay Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley (1963), about the internal machinations of a space crew of military men. Stranded on an alien planet, they accept futuristic sex reassignment surgery in order to fulfill their duty of carrying on the human race. But the soldiers’ strongly held beliefs about manhood conflict with their desire to complete their mission. In this story, bottom surgery is humanity’s salvation. For Wells and Bradley, the soldier's newfound motherhood is not simply a pragmatic matter but also fulfills their desires for familial intimacy outside of traditional masculinity. The central conflicts of the story are internal and self-induced, as the soldiers work to shed gendered limitations of their old world. They work through feelings of revulsion surrounding queerness, confiding in each other: “I was taught it was a sin. The sin.” The only people telling them they can’t have what they want— motherhood, companionship, the masculine ideal—are themselves. “Another Rib” puts internalized anxieties about queerness on display. The soldiers are found processing themselves through the lens of their old planet, where motherhood and manhood are paradoxical. They cannot both be held at the same time. Throughout the text, the men ask themselves: What will people think? What does this mean for me as a man? As the only human survivors in a cold, dark universe, they receive no reply.
Ursula K. Le Guin continues this exploration of inner turmoil in 1995’s “Coming of Age in Karhide.” She imagines an adult population that lacks genital differentiation during 24 of 26 days of the lunar cycle. During the other two days, organs form at random. On Le Guin’s planet, sex is a tradition performed monthly with pomp and circumstance in Roman-esque bathhouses. The teenaged main character, Sov, at once feels both deep revulsion for her society’s norms and tentative excitement at the premise of reaching adulthood. The story highlights her anxieties about her newly amorphous and polysexual body: “I was utterly ashamed. I was dying.” I saw some of what I experienced with the Hermaphrodite Cowboy in Sov—a sort of recoiling from the unruly.
Le Guin doesn’t make Sov parse her feelings by herself. Her community of motherparents and mothersibs give guidance and comfort, allowing her to make sense of her constantly shifting embodiment. Sov’s community eschews the nuclear family model in favor of large,
communal “hearths.” With this, Le Guin imagines a more expansive familial intimacy that encourages infinite sexual expression. She disrupts preconceived notions through her utopia of bodily freedom, but is careful to maintain and strengthen that which is familiar: values of compassion and care. “Coming of Age in Karhide” is a lesson in not throwing out the baby with the bathwater; some of what we have is precious, and we should take it with us as we move forward.
Between the pages we can hear Le Guin’s protest against our own preconceptions surrounding familial and sexual relationships. She expresses queerness differently than the authors of “Another Rib”; readers of “Coming of Age in Karhide” are dropped right in, with no translation for the invented language and portmanteaus. It's not told from the tense, apprehensive perspective of the men in “Another Rib” who confront a radically different way of relating to their body, but is instead at total ease with its innovation. The reader can either sink or swim, and as foreign as this alien galaxy was to me, I found myself able to keep up. Le Guin’s transness doesn’t explain itself. It isn’t anxious; it is fully self-assured. Science fiction allows for the subaltern to shine in a way that other forms don’t, with rules rewritten in the marginalized person’s favor. The genre allows us to take for granted that which is so painfully lacking in real life.
The Hermaphrodite Cowboy is not pathologized for his troubling of the gender binary, but rather celebrated and valued because of it. He’s not drawn from an image of lack, but rather an enriching wholeness. Depathologizing differences is central to Disability Justice, a framework I subscribe to that necessitates making the neglected visible and contending with that which has been pushed aside or ignored. Following the most radical works of queer science fiction, I imagine a future where traditionally marginalized people are not just accepted but appreciated.
I find such joy in these early fantastical exercises of making what is spectacular mundane; they speak to me and the causes I’m passionate about. I also contend with the fact that that’s just what they are: fantasy These stories take place on alien planets in distant futures, yet much of what they depict in the way of body modification and nonconformance exist here and now. Experiences of transness and Disability land with weight upon the body. We shouldn’t reduce them to concepts only imaginable in a land far, far away. I choose to view these works as burgeoning and fallible efforts to explore that which could be. And I am grateful for what I learned from them. Today, I can finally give the Hermaphrodite Cowboy his dues.
BACK 2 SCHOOL: JEALOUS ROOMMATES, WISTFUL EXES, AND INDIE OVERSHARES.
By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be dead. Kidding! Not quite, but summer will officially be over, and with it, so many of the things that make life worth living. Personally, I’ll be saying goodbye to getting wine drunk on my couch, close encounters of the third kind (run-ins with my high school ghosts), and unfathomable amounts of reality television. But as I’m tearfully kissing these things goodbye, I’m also trying hard to remember that the semester brings its own special type of magic. I’m looking forward to answering the many (many) extravagant Facebook invites I plan on receiving, alongside mastering my fear of the awkward run-in. If my extremely busy social schedule allows, I might even take some time to answer your questions.
I also have a confession (which I’ve smartly decided is going into this public forum and not my journal): I just made my first major faux pas of the semester While perched semi-awkwardly on the MG, I abruptly found myself surrounded by a large group of people, all of whom I desperately wanted to avoid. I’ll spare my readers the gruesome details, but through a series of unfortunate events, I was unable to extract myself in a composed manner. Blah! Yet, while I was beating myself up for not acting better – e.g. cooler, smarter, and sexier – it hit me that this isn’t the last opportunity I’ll have to make this mistake. The nascent semester, above all, offers us the opportunity to make and remake our same mistakes countless times.
So, with that, cheers to repeat mistakes, fumbling beginnings, and hopefully, a little advice along the way.
Dear Needing an Ex-orcist,
Dear Indie,
It’s been six months since my ex and I broke up. Being back on campus reminds me of our relationship, and I find myself missing them all over again. What can I do to finally get over them?
Sincerely, Needing an Ex-orcist
It’s no secret that places remind us of people – for example, each time I walk past the Chipotle on Thayer I think about a particularly bad ex-text I once received there, upon which I promptly walked into a lamppost and received a glorious bruise on my forehead. For the next few weeks, the bruise served as a pretty gross reminder of something I wanted to forget – each time I looked into the mirror, it brought to the surface a disconcerting combination of anxiety, longing, and a healthy heaping of cringe. Which is all to say, I get you: reminders of exes pop up everywhere, and they can totally suck.
But to answer your question, I’ll tell you that if I’m certain of anything, it’s that you can’t rush closure. Trying to force it is a lot like popping a pimple in that moment of desperation before FDOC, and then realizing that all you’ve done is make it much, much uglier. Ultimately, there’s genuinely nothing to do about the pimple of an ex other than to wait it out, and know that the more you touch it,* the worse you’re making it. I don’t know your exact sitch, but the only thing I can promise you is
In the meantime, however, there are things you can do to make yourself feel better, which I’ll call the Mario Badescu Drying Lotions of breakups (has the metaphor gone too far?). In a situation like yours, I’d first opt for believing in ignorance as bliss. Put yourself into an information lockdown – don’t be afraid to mute them on all platforms (go ahead and mute their friends too), and tell your friends that you don’t want to hear any updates on them. I promise you, it’s not important for you to know that they were spotted in the Ratty getting chicken parm.
After you’ve done this, you’re in the perfect position to start feeling better. Try adding new people into your life by expanding your Close Friends story to people who probably shouldn’t be on there; put yourself out there by making a shitty Tinder with your friends, pretending it’s a joke, and then covertly spending the night swiping away; focus on improving yourself by getting super into the idea of running, buying a pair of expensive sneakers, and then quitting immediately. None of these things are a miracle cure, but historically, My housemates, when I posed them this question, also repeated some ancient wisdom: “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.” I think it’s Sophocles. *Get it?
Dear Competitive Urge,
Dear Indie,
I just moved onto campus, and my roommate is hotter than me. They get way more attention from guys and girls alike and it’s starting to sting. How can I compete?
Sincerely, Competitive Urge
Let me start with this: on a campus with a lot of hot people, this is a question as old as time itself. Hot-person imposter syndrome is rampant at Brown, and I remember experiencing it hard when I went to my first Pink-Whitney-fueled, LED-lit dorm rager (reader, it was ten people). It seemed like everyone around me had mastered the art of their appearance, knew exactly how to take a shot in a sexy way and not by gagging profusely, and even further, that feeling less-hot was so very high school and not at all cool to talk about (which is maybe why you’re submitting this anonymously). So I feel you. But I also can’t answer this question by saying “omg NO you’re soooo hot. hotter than them, even!” because I really don’t know you like that. Maybe you’re average looking, and you’re rooming with a Bella Hadid lookalike. So all I can say is this: you have two options. You can try to compete (through sabotage à la Nair in their shampoo or via a romcom glow-up montage) or you can accept the situation.
I’ll address the former first (doy). As I was thinking about a way to answer your question straight, how can you compete – all the things I thought of were things you should never ever do, unless you’re in a 2000s chick flick and your roommate is the devil incarnate. But even then, you shouldn’t do it. (Think: spreading an incest rumor, telling them that they could totally be the one to bring sideburns back, asking them when they’re going to change (when you know they already have), letting them know that deodorant isn’t cool anymore, chemical warfare, etc.) Because if the famous nipple-cut-out tank of Mean Girls (2004) taught us anything, it’s that trying to sabotage a hot person almost never works – they just keep looking hot, and you look dumb. So, while I totally get the instinct to compete with your roommate, you might feel better if you forsake the idea of competition altogether. Instead, own all the other things that make you great: maybe you’re totally sick at solving a Rubik’s cube, or you’ve nailed a great signature scent. Maybe you’re super talented at tastefully decorating a college dorm room or at setting boundaries with your mom – two tasks so hard they should be in the Olympics. If you can realize that you’re running your own race and you’re not in competition with everyone around you, maybe the sting will start to fade.
The Bulletin.
Upcoming Actions & Community Events ▉
Every Wednesday @4:30PM: Stop Torture Coalition Meetings
The Stop Torture Coliation is dedicated to ending the use of extended solitary confinement in the prison system. Show up to their weekly Wednesday meetings to express your support or get involved!
Location: DARE, 340 Lockwood St, Providence, RI 02907
Friday 09/15 @8AM-5PM: Park(ing) Day
This day is reserved as a public project for people across the world to temporarily take over curbside parking spots and redesign them as communal spaces for the community to enjoy. As part of a larger movement for safer, greener, and more pedestrian-friendly streets, Park(ing) Day is a great way to express your creativity and reimagine the city. The RI Chapters of the American Planning Association (APA-RI) and American Association of Landscape Architects (ASLA-RI) are sponsoring metered spots in Downtown Providence. Check out www.parkingpvd.com to sign up for a parking spot of your own!
Location: Downtown Providence, Providence, RI 02903
Saturday 09/16 @12PM-4PM: Community Give Back Day
Sponsored by the Power Health Tour, Organized Youth, this national initiative partners with businesses to host a series of free health, wellness, fitness, and empowerment events for the public. This event will include screenings, fresh produce, arts and crafts, local and national vendors, employment and senior services, as well as a live DJ!
Location: John H. Rollins Recreation Center, Ocean St, Providence, RI 02905
Sunday 09/17 @12PM-4PM: Rally4Recovery Annual Celebration
This September, participate in Rally4Recovery as part of National Recovery Month! This annual event celebrates healing from addiction, featuring speakers such as Sheldon Whitehouse and Brett Smiley, live music from Ravi Shavi and Nolan Leite, a treatment and recovery exposition, job fair, free food, and a raffle.
Location: 195 District Park, Downtown Providence, Providence, RI 02903
Tuesday 09/19 @4PM: Kadji Amin’s talk on Trans Materialism
As part of the Pembroke Seminar “De-Colonial Retro-Speculation,” Join Kadji Amin, the Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, as he discusses queer history, the material needs of transition, and the practice of transitioning. With a specific focus on people of color, working-class people, and sex workers, Professor Amin hones in on why it’s important to make the basic resources necessary to transition available and accessible to all.
Location: Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting St, Providence, RI 02912
Thursday 09/21 @12PM-1PM: Contagion’s Antonym, or One Hundred Years of Waiting
Learn about trans history and the history of sexuality from Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University through the Pembroke Public Health Collaborative. This series of Zoom talks, grounded in a century’s worth of medical archival evidence, aims to discuss how the history of trans children affected the development of transgender medicine. The talks will also delve into how this impacts trans and nonbinary youth today.
Location: Virtual, register through the Pembroke Center
Arts ▉
Friday 09/15 @4:30PM-6PM: Soggy Cereal 2023 Summer Exhibition Opening
Join New Urban Arts, an organization that connects high school students and adult mentors to connect through creative expression, as they celebrate the work of their students from this summer. Enjoy art, food, and karaoke as they show off what skills, ideas, and visions they’ve brought to life!
Location: New Urban Arts, 705 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02903
Friday 09/15 @6PM-9PM: Hispanic Heritage Month Art Exhibit
This opening night of Public Shop and Gallery’s art exhibition exploring Hispanic heritage delivers an art show spotlighting Hispanic/Latine artists. A food pop-up will also be present, courtesy of Latin Soul. This event is free and open to the public.
Location: Public Shop and Gallery, 27 Sims Avenue, Providence 02909
Saturday 09/16 @11AM-3PM: Fall Maker Marketplace
The Community Libraries of Providence and Papitto Opportunity Connection is sponsoring an outdoor marketplace dedicated to local businesses selling hand-crafted goods and refreshments from food trucks. Many vendors and community organizations will be present, and there will be free activities, crafts, and ice cream while supplies last.
Location: Rochambeau Library (Patio), 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906
Mutual aid* & community fundraisers ▉
*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.
+ Donate to RI Community Court Debt Fund
DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equity) operates a fund to help members of the community pay off court debts that often accumulate without their knowledge and can lead to warrants for their arrest. Help Rhode Islanders facing financial hardship keep their freedom, jobs, and families by donating here: https://direct-action-for-rights-and-equality.snwbll.com/ri-community-court-debt-fund
+ Wide Awakes Collective
Wide Awakes Collective is a Providence community aid collective. Every week, Wide Awakes collects and distributes clothes to people in need at the Kennedy Plaza. Currently, the organization is searching for volunteers to help with sorting clothes on Sundays. DM @wideawakescollective on Instagram if interested!
+ AMOR Bond Fund 2022-2025
The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is a grassroots, community-led coalition working to provide support for immigrant Rhode Islanders, including organizing legal services, holding knowyour-rights trainings, and accompanying clients to court dates and ICE check-ins. All donations to AMOR’s legal fund will go toward paying for clients’ legal expenses and bonds. Donate at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/freethemall or write a check to “Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance” with the memo “Legal Fund” and mail to: AMOR, P.O. Box 9379, Providence, RI 02940.
+ 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 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!
+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund
Venmo: @OSA-funds | Paypal: oceanstateass | Actblue: osamutualaid
O$A is an organization of current and former sex workers in Rhode Island that advocates for the decriminalization of sex work. They also work at the intersections between housing justice, queer liberation, prison abolition, and more! Donate to their mutual aid fund to support sex workers statewide!
( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & ANGELINA RIOS-GALINDO DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION SARAPHINA FORMAN )