The College Hill Independent: 13 April 2012

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT VO LUME

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FROM THE EDITORS WEEK IN REVIEW DAVID ADLER, ALEX RONAN, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

SOMEONE’S GOTTA ALEX RONAN

METRO

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POWER PEOPLE MADISEN OBIEDO

FEATURES

7 CULTURE WARS 8 ICE-D OUT 1 0 PG-13 PROTEST LAURA NOORANI

Last week’s College Hill Independent vs. Brown Daily Herald kickball game was a war of the worlds. The Indy in stripes; the BDH in solids. The Indy with brains; the BDH with brawn. The Indy drinking the Champagne of Beers; the BDH drinking the Natural Light of beers. The Indy with a boom box; the BDH with a clipboard.

The Indy wearing New Balance; the BDH wearing Asics. The BDH racist; the BDH sexist. It was a David and Goliath story, and the BDH was both; the Indy was busy stealing their girlfriends.

The game was an Indy highlight reel [too hetronormative? -ed]. Senior editor Jordan Carter leapt through the air, making one-handed catches in the outfield.

Opinions editor Steve Carmody peeled back his outer layers of flesh to reveal a golden boot, knocking the big red ball right out of the park. Literary editor Scout Willis dove face first to snag the fifth inning’s crucial last out. And News editor Alex Ronan kept the team in order at home base, psyching out batters from behind the plate.

It wasn’t pretty—four beers deep, the rainstorms forming thick patches of mud on the diamond, the winds crying through the April air—but the Indy emerged the victorious.* As Malcolm Burnley trudged through the rain to round third in the bottom of the 9th, the team formed its huddle at home base to celebrate the winning run. Sleep Less! Fuck more! Die Faster! Go Indy! *Dramatization. Actual score 13-6 in favor of the Brown Daily Herald.

-DRA

EMILY GOGOLAK

SOPHIA SEAWELL

EPHEMERA

ARTS

1 2 RUINS, ART, BERLIN JOHN WHITE

OPINIONS

1 3 SPOKEN TONGUES STEPHEN CARMODY

SCIENCE

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GOD PARTICLE RAILLAN BROOKS

FOOD

1 6 HI, NEIGHBOR! BEN WOLKON

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MOONSCOPES JOSH SUNDERMAN

LITERARY

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URMILA CHADAYAMMURI

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ROBERT JOSEPH SANDLER

ABOUT MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES David Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alex Corrigan, Dylan Treleven, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Andrew Beers, Jess Bendit, Abigail Cain, Olivia Fialkow, Jared Stern ∙ CHIEFS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Robert Sandler Cover Art: Robert Sandler

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT PO BOX 1930 BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie theindy.org Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people–advocates, activists, journalists, artists– make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

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the college hill independent

STRESS BALLS

WEEK IN REVIEW WEEK IN REVIEW WEEK IN REVIEW WEEK IN REVIEW Illustration by Diane Zhou

by David Adler

“Good Grades through Good Sex” is the magic formula proposed by three male undergraduates at the University of Mannheim in southwestern Germany who have generously offered their time and their bodies to stressed-out female peers. The operation is called “Bib:Love”—a play on the German word for library, Bibliothek— and seeks to better the academic lives of female students through one-night encounters. “Many students are too stressed out during exams to go out at night,” explained Bib:Love’s founders to Der Speigel.

“This leads their sex lives to languish.” So the brave young men set out to fill this need— they put up posters and set up a Hotmail account (Hotmail?) where frustrated females can request a booking with their choice of pseudonym-ed Oskar, Julius, or Christopher.

The idea came to them during an alcoholfueled bro-sesh last fall. Why is it, they asked themselves, that “girls who just want to have some fun are labeled as sluts”? With a three-way high five, these gentlemen began their crusade for female sexual emancipation.

But, like most male feminists, their commitment to the cause only Extenze so far: “The young men reserve the right to withdraw their service should a girl’s appearance be unpromising,” reports the

PANDAMONIUM

German newspaper. The protocol is as follows: they meet their dates at the L3 student café at the University, chat over a beer, and if the chemistry is right, take them home for coital therapy. Really, it’s all pretty conservative—Bib:Love refuses to accommodate any unusual sexual preferences, and breakfast is not guaranteed.

Only five one-night stands have taken place so far, but the young entrepreneurs have already received over 80 messages in the few days since its launch earlier this month—requests, fan mail, and invitations to bring the service to neighboring campuses. Lisa, Bib:Love’s first client, said her experience was great. She doesn’t feel particularly emancipated, nor have her grades climbed after the fact. But she still recommends the service to young women looking for companionship.

Remarkably, there has been little backlash from university officials and the student body association. According to Der Speigel, they “are primarily viewing the campaign with a sense of humor.” Germany, of course, has always struggled with social graces. But still, guys, come on, what the fuck?

by Alex Ronan

Everyone’s favorite grayscale friends are having a moment. The Edinburgh Zoo’s giant pandas, Sweetie (Tian Tian in Chinese) and Sunshine (Yang Guang), were set to “do it” last week. Pandas are solitary animals, and females ovulate just once a year for approximately 36 hours. Sunshine and Sweetie are among the 300 pandas in captivity, and there are only around 1,600 left in the wild, so their sex lives are especially important. As Sweetie approached ovulation, Iain Valentine, the Zoo’s director of animals, research, and conservation told the Mirror that staff had noted “behavioral changes” as she grew increasingly hot and bothered (“going up to the grate between the two enclosures”) and subsequently “spending time in her pond to cool her internal system down.”

Before the two met in a so-called “love tunnel” between their enclosures, they swapped spaces. She “rolled in his hay” (literally) and he repeatedly rubbed against a tree that she’d been marking. For the past two weeks, Sunshine has doubled his bamboo intake and Sweetie has cut down on hers, both apparently good signs. The zoo even turned off the “pandacam,” which

allows people to watch the two online, lest things get a little too X-rated or Sunshine suffers from performance anxiety.

On April 3, Sunshine and Sweetie finally came face to face. “As soon as they were introduced, they had a bit of ‘wrestling,’” a press release stated. Darren McGarry, Head of Animals at the Zoo, told the Telegraph that Sunshine “did mount her straight away, but no actual copulation took place.” Within minutes “the atmosphere changed,” and “she started to get fed up” so the staff temporarily separated the two pandas. By the afternoon, both pandas were sleeping off the stress in their own enclosures. The next day, they tried again to no avail. But as the day wore on, Sweetie was just “not in the mood,” according to a statement released by the zoo.

There is no previous record of captive giant pandas successfully mating on their first try, so zoo staff were not too dismayed when ten encounters over two days yielded nothing but another reminder that natural selection sucks.

MOUNTING PRESSURE by Erica Schwiegershausen “Men should never ride bicycles. Riding should be banned and outlawed. It is the most irrational form of exercise I could ever bring to discussion,” Dr. Irwin Goldstein stated in the August 1997 issue of Bicycling Magazine. For years, controversial studies have linked traditional bicycle seats (narrow rear, pointy nose) to erectile dysfunction, impotence, and loss of libido, but new research shows that women may not be exempt from cycle-related trauma.

The New York Times explains that “many women who cycle or take spin classes are familiar with the numbness that sometimes can occur from sitting on a traditional bike seat.” In a 2006 study, researchers at Yale found that female cyclists had less genital sensation than female runners.

In the latest study, 48 consistent female cyclists—riding a minimum of 10 miles a week, but typically much more—reported whether they felt “soreness, numbness, or tingling” while pedaling, and a device was used to measure “sensation on the pelvic floor.” The findings, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, concluded that modifying

bicycle set-ups—particularly the height of the handlebars, which is deemed to have the biggest effect on sensation while on the bike seat—may help to assuage neuropathies in females.

Steven M. Schrader, a scientist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, who helped document original (though disputed) links between bicycle seats and erectile dysfunction in studies of male police officers on bicycle patrol, told the Times that problems faced by female riders will need more long-term study. In the meantime, he recommends the use of “no-nose” saddles for female and male riders (for more information, see his 2008 study entitled “Cutting off the Nose to Save the Penis.”)

Recreational cyclists apparently have less to worry about than consistent riders, but regardless, concerned parties may want to watch their perineum pressure. Looks like it’s time to dust off the old Segway.

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news

13 april 2012

WIN BIG B e h i n d t h e Lu c k y N u m b e r s

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inancial security,” NightStalker explained, adding “I’d go into more detail, but since you are a college kid, I don’t want to scare you with what the real world has waiting for you.” I was visiting an online lotto forum, LotteryPost.com, trying to find out why so many people play the lottery, despite the horrible odds. NightStalker didn’t give his real name, but he did explain that freedom from the “daily grind” was his primary motivation for it. “I’m not going to [have to] argue with my wife about spending $500 on a stupid pond in the front yard that no one sees, because I won’t care about what other more important items that $500 could have been spent on,” he added. When it comes to playing, he’s not alone. The North American lottery industry is a $70 billion-a-year business—bigger than music, movie tickets, and porn combined. The lotto often draws low-income players, and sudden wealth isn’t the only appeal of the game. Playing the lottery provides a fleeting sense of power; before the numbers are called, before the card is scratched, luck seems mutable. And with most games coming in at around a dollar a pop, hope comes pretty cheap.

In a sense, the lottery functions as a poor man’s stock market. Involving chance and the possibility of reward, “both [systems] offer people risky monetary returns,” explains Russell Golman, the Director of the Quantitative Social Science Scholars Program and a visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“The difference is the stock market returns, on average, more than investors put in.” The chances of winning the big jackpot in Mega Millions type games are one in 176 million.

Scratch-off games have better odds, but are still largely a money losing proposition. In Illinois, the probability of just breaking even on a scratch-off is one in four at best, so for every $4 you spend, you may get $1 back. “If you only have a few dollars of disposable income, you’re stuck with the lottery,” Golman said. “The lottery thus attracts poor people and has the perverse effect of keeping these people poor.”

A five-year longitudinal study published in the Chicago Reporter compared lottery sales figures around the state with demographic data from the census. The residents of the 10 zip codes with the highest lottery sales had average incomes of less than $20,000 per year. Eighty percent of these zip codes had unemployment rates higher than the city average.

It may seem like small change, but regular playing quickly adds up. One zip code, 60619, spent nearly $23 million on the lottery in just one year.

And states directly target the poor—past advertising slogans for the Illinois lottery included, “This could be your ticket out,” which was featured on billboards in economically depressed areas.

Another campaign promised the lottery was “How to Get from Washington Boulevard to Easy Street.” Washington Boulevard is in Chicago’s Westside neighborhood, which is notoriously poor.

Players on LotteryPost.com didn’t cite poverty directly, but its corollary, the promise of wealth, was mentioned again and again.

According to one commenter, while “most forms of gambling are an attempt to bring in a little extra money,” the lottery has bigger stakes. “Lottery jackpot games offer a way to get out of ‘the trap’ for good. For most working slobs, it’s the only way to make a major score.” Rose, who chose not to give her last name but disclosed that she’s “older than dirt and loving life,” said the lotto dream provides “the escape from the tedium of the daily drudge.” Although they often joked with one another, and professed a love for the lottery, respondents came across as frustrated and embittered with their current financial situation.

Research has shown that when people are made to “feel poor,” they spend more on lotto tickets. A study published in The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty demonstrated that implicit comparisons to other income classes increase poor people’s desire to play the lottery. In one experiment, participants were given $5 for completing a survey and then given the opportunity to spend that money on lottery tickets. Subjects were either made to “feel relatively poor” or “relatively rich” by completing questions that included an item on annual income.

Subjects in one group were asked to rank their incomes on a scale that began with either “less than $100,000” and increased from there, intending for most participants to fall into the lowest group, priming them to feel poor. For the other group, the scale began with “less than $10,000” and increased in increments of $10,000, so that subjects would feel wealthier. Those who were made to feel poorer subsequently bought twice as many lottery tickets.

In the second experiment, some participants were indirectly reminded that, while different income groups face unequal prospects in education, housing, and employment, everyone has an equal chance to win the lottery. Participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they received the implicit reminder that the lottery is a “social equalizer.”

MO’ MONEY MO’ PROBLEMS Although many spend their disposable income on the lottery, winning may not be so great after all. According to Golman, “hedonic adaptation”— a phenomenon in which people quickly become used to changes, good or bad, in order to maintain a stable level of happiness, suggests that winning won’t provide lasting satisfaction.

Wealth offers the opportunity for new and exciting pleasures while simultaneously minimizing joy previously found in mundane activities, a contrast effect that mitigates against a sustained happiness gain by lottery winners. Hedonic adaptation is supported by research. In an August 2010 issue of

the college hill independent

news

LOSE BIGGER

by Alex Ronan Illustration by Diane Zhou Photo Credit: Samuel Jackson Psychological Science, an international team of researchers published a study—“Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away”—suggesting that wealth offers us the opportunity to buy more things but simultaneously impairs our ability to truly enjoy them.

Then there’s the oft cited “lottery curse” which suggests that big winners often meet an untimely demise. No study has yet to determine whether the suicides, murders, and kidnappings of lottery winners is statistically significant, but there has been some research on the impact of monetary windfalls. While higher income is associated with better health, the suddenly rich experience, what economists call “positive income shock,” generally leads to more dangerous behavior and poorer health.

Take, for example, Mack Metcalf, a forklift operator, who shared a $34 million Kentucky Powerball jackpot with his exwife. Metcalf used his winnings to fill his home with tarantulas, Rottweilers, and a boa constrictor. Three years later, he was dead of hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. Or, consider William Hurt, winner of a $3.1 million jackpot in Michigan’s lottery, who relapsed into a cocaine addiction, “literally blowing through his savings,” according to one article. The study on positive income shock, suggests that sudden wealth turns non-smokers into smokers and compels smokers to smoke more. It has similar effects on drinking. While the already-rich have lower mortality rates than everyone else, the suddenly-rich experience the opposite.

“At first sight, this looks surprising,” one of the study’s authors, Bénédicte Apouey, told The Daily Beast. “However, previous macroeconomic research has found that when the economy expands in the US, physical health deteriorates.”

NOT REALLY ALL ABOUT BENJAMINS Despite ethical complications, many believe that if people are going to gamble anyway, the state might as well benefit from it. Lottery revenue is divided in three ways: approximately 60 percent goes to the winners; another 15 percent goes to marketing, retailers, and operations; and the remaining 25 percent goes back to the state. In Kansas, some of the money pays for juvenile detention facilities; in Pennsylvania, senior citizen programs; Colorado directs the money to environmental protection. But by and large, funding is directed towards education, with 27 states earmarking some or all of lottery revenue for this purpose.

Yet critics maintain that the lottery functions as a sort of legislative bait-andswitch, wherein money formerly directed to education is simply redirected with the introduction of the lottery revenue.

According to this criticism, the lottery doesn’t increase spending on education, but merely changes its source. A study from 1997, when state lotteries were less widespread than they are today, determined that “regardless of when or where the lottery operated, education spending declined once a state put a lottery into effect.” Duke

professor Charles Clotfelter, who has authored a book on state lotteries, told CBS News that “it’s very hard to say that these lottery dollars really make a difference.”

Other critics are wary of the cost the lottery takes on the poor, likening it to a regressive tax.

In 1996, Congress funded the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), which spent two years reviewing the social and economic impacts of gambling. The commission found that an unusually large number of lottery outlets were concentrated in poor neighborhoods and expressed serious concern about government reliance on less-educated, lowincome players. Phillip J. Cook, the leading researcher of the study stated, “The tax that is built into the lottery is the most regressive tax we know.”

This issue has recently come to a head in Georgia, where lawmakers are battling over the HOPE college scholarship program. A merit-based scholarship, HOPE is exclusively funded by lottery revenue.

Between 2010 and 2011, $679 million was awarded in scholarships. In 2011, 74,278 students received HOPE scholarships. Only 16.5 percent were African American, though they represent 30 percent of the college age population in Georgia. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus has introduced legislation to correct the socioeconomic disparity of scholarship distributions.

New regulations would prevent HOPE scholarships from going to a student whose family earns more than $140,000 annually. According to Sen. Lester Jackson, who authored the bill, most scholarships go to students whose families earn more than $200,000. “We as a state have been bamboozled into thinking that HOPE is attainable to all students when we know that many Georgia citizens in inner cities, in rural Georgia play into the lottery, but their chances of HOPE are miniscule,” Jackson told the Times-Herald.

The legislation further specifies that scholarships should be granted regionally in proportion to the volume of Georgia lottery tickets purchased in the area, which assures that the lottery doesn’t work regressively.

Sen. Emanuel Jones, chairman of the Caucus, told The Senate Press that Gov. Nathan Deal was on board with the required audits, which would necessitate reports on the demographic breakdown of both the lottery players and scholarship beneficiaries.

But as for the rest of the legislative package, according to Jones, the governor just “said ‘good luck.’”

ALEX RONAN B’13.5 would never spend $500 on a stupid pond in the front yard that no one sees.

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6 metro

13 april 2012

FINDING THE FUERZA Fuerza Laboral and its Campaign Against Wage Theft in Rhode Island

by Madisen Obiedo Illustration by Annika Finne

T

he office of Fuerza Laboral, Worker Power, is located in the heart of Central Falls on the second story of an old warehouse building. Founded in 2006, Fuerza began as an immigrant and worker’s rights organization committed to organizing for justice in the workplace. Fuerza is a grassroots chameleon of sorts. Combining direct action organizing, legislative advocacy, and an emphasis on worker empowerment through education, Fuerza works to end abuses against workers and safeguard their livelihoods. Handwritten agendas in Spanish line the walls of Fuerza’s office. Alternating ranchero music and classic rock tunes reverberate through the high-ceilinged space as worker-members stop by to meet with Josie Shagwert, the executive director, or collaborate on campaign planning materials.

As a member of the National People’s Action Network, Fuerza collaborates with other grassroots organizations—at national, state, and local levels—to eradicate workplace injustice throughout the country.

Fuerza prides itself on being located in Central Falls, one of the most densely populated cities in the country. Largely populated by Hispanic immigrants, Central Falls is home to many of the organization’s members. “You know, it’s fitting that our office is so close to one of the first strikes in the country,” Shagwert laughed. That spirit of grassroots organizing—initiated by the textile worker strike of 1834 near Central Falls—continues to drive the worker-members of Fuerza today.

José Ignacio is one such worker-member. Currently in his fifth year as a workermember and on the board of directors, Ignacio came to Fuerza after his brother had been badly injured at work and then fired by his employer. “My brother was injured and decided to take vacation days to recover.

When he came back to work, his boss told him that they didn’t owe him any money, that he’d been fired the week before.”1* His story is not unique at Fuerza, where experiences of abuse in the workplace are common among the two hundred workermembers and counting. Ignacio and his brother were two of the earliest members.

With Fuerza’s help, they filed a successful claim against his employer with the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training.

Though Ignacio’s brother did not receive full payment for the week he did not work—his employer claimed his vacation was not paid—the employer was held responsible for his medical bills and for compensating him the non-vacation days he missed. Despite the (partial) victory, however, José Ignacio’s brother decided to leave the United States 1* Interview with José Ignacio occurred in Spanish, translated by author.

and return home to El Salvador a few weeks later.

Many migrants face this choice: to remain in the US, where abuse against immigrant workers is common, or return home where jobs are often scarcer and wages lower.

It is no secret that US employers in lowwage sectors often use intimidation tactics against more vulnerable workers, particularly undocumented immigrants. A Pew Hispanic Center report from 2011 found that compared to US-born workers in low-wage industries, documented and undocumented immigrant workers reported significantly higher incidents of wage theft violations.

Threats of deportation are commonplace, and often, this is enough to keep undocumented workers on the job under abusive conditions.

But in the minds of Fuerza’s leadership and members, justice should not depend on immigration status. The organization’s executive director, Josie Shagwert, explains, “When a person works an hour, they have a right to be paid for that hour of work. I don’t care if they’re an alien from outer space, labor laws apply to all workers regardless of status.” In spite of deportation threats from employers, undocumented workers have standing to sue an employer for back wages in addition to other workplace violations.

Today, Fuerza Laboral prefers not to emphasize the immigration status of its workermembers. A strategic planning meeting last year—attended by the Board of Directors, the two staff members, and active-leaders— resulted in a refocusing of the organization’s work on workplace justice for all, including but not limited to immigrants.

The organization’s campaign against wage theft is but one of a number of ongoing campaigns at Fuerza Laboral, though according to Shagwert, it is one of the most important. At monthly worker-member meetings, workers participate in multiple activities to parse through what issues they’d like to actively pursue a campaign. Wage theft is often the most popular because worker-members experience it so frequently.

Campaigns at Fuerza integrate direct action organizing around legislation, and bring attention to the goals of the campaign through education. Because the organization only two staff members, worker-members spearhead the majority of the organization’s work in the community. Increased commitment to a particular campaign allows worker-members to become what are called active-leaders in the organization. Volunteers also play a fundamental role in the organization’s campaigns, with students or community members coming in to teach classes on media programs or how to conduct effective research. Fuerza’s wage theft campaign is no

different.

In addition to using federal and state enforcement mechanisms against wage theft, worker-members often protest outside of employers’ homes or offices. “It is one thing to send a letter to an employer saying you haven’t paid me,” Ignacio said “It is more effective to bring it to their home, to their community, so that they know we aren’t afraid to stand up for ourselves.” To José Ignacio, protests outside of employers’ homes emphasize how wage theft and violations of labor law affect worker communities.

The tactic endows workers with a specific power—the power to affect an employer’s home environment in the same way that an employer practicing wage theft or other workplace violations affects a worker’s home.

Currently, Fuerza is compiling data on wage theft to support legislation criminalizing it.

Bill H-7860, introduced to the General Assembly this spring by Rhode Island Representative Agostinho Silva, would criminalize wage theft first as a misdemeanor and then, should the behavior continue, as a felony.

Additionally, the bill would also require that employers who are found to be withholding wages from their workers pay the workers double, or triple in some cases, the amount withheld from them. Wage theft violations, under the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, are currently treated as misdemeanors with a four hundred dollar fine for each violation. Worker-members see the bill’s steep penalties as a major step towards ending the practice of wage theft in Rhode Island.

The study seeks to provide lawmakers with quantitative and qualitative data that would illustrate the economic impact of wage theft on Rhode Island, as well as elucidate individual experiences of wage theft.

Though many studies have been done on other workplace violations in Rhode Island, this study will provide explicit data revealing the effects that the practice has for both taxpayers and workers.

To Shagwert, wage theft is not a labor issue unique to Rhode Island. “We’re locally based, sure. Yet, what is going on is a sort of epidemic that everyone in this country is experiencing. It’s a collapse not just of local systems but of national ones as well.” A groundbreaking study conducted by the National Employment Law Project called “Broken Laws” demonstrated that the problem of wage theft is indeed a national one. Showing a dramatic increase in wage theft claims filed with the Department of Labor in addition to worker interviews, “Broken Laws” will serve as a model for Fuerza’s statewide study.

Worker-members at Fuerza Laboral hope

that the study will convince the General Assembly’s Committee on Labor to vote in favor of H-7860, and that wage theft in Rhode Island will be treated as a crime that merits more punishment than a $400 fine.

Popular education is the basis of all of the organization’s campaigns—educating workers to understand workplace abuse and their workplace rights. Shagwert explains, “We had a debate here, should popular education be its own program?” For Fuerza, the best way to understand how to end workplace injustice is to talk to people who experience it. “Really it’s a part of every single program that we do because it’s the first step that members take to begin empowering themselves, to have the knowledge that they need to first of all know what abuses they’re going through and be able define that.” The experience of Ignacio and his brother speaks to the effectiveness of the model: the two filed a claim immediately after attending a know-your-rights class at Fuerza.

Shagwert finds that those who are most active at Fuerza are those who experience wage theft or other workplace violations multiple times, with different employers. “That really forces the issue for those worker-members. It makes them realize that it’s not that they’re doing a bad job at work or somehow deserve the treatment they receive.” Many employers will cite poor performance of a task or accuse workers of breaking equipment as justification for withholding wages, but Shagwert sees a deeper cause. “No, it’s a specific population of people manipulating a system.” This gross manipulation is something that Shagwert hopes all workers who experience workplace injustice can see for what it is. She wants them “to get a little angry,” she says. “You can’t organize with people who aren’t riled up.” In Central Falls, two hundred people and counting are riled up and doing something about it; hopefully the legislature will follow their lead.

MADISEN OBIEDO B’12 got angry, really angry.

features

the college hill independent

7

culture wars in US politics

race to the

PAST

by Laura Noorani Illustration by Charis Loke

L

ast January, at a campaign speech in Cocao, Florida, Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich made a promise both for and from an America of the past, telling voters, “We will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Like countless presidential candidates before him, Gingrich has shifted his discourse away from the nation’s current economic woes and towards something new, or more accurately, old: a discussion on the traditional America—in what media pundits are calling “culture wars.”

Dismissed by many as a rhetorical ploy to attract media and voter attention, the term culture wars describes a conflict in moral values within a society or nation.

These social cleavages generally arise between conservative and liberal social viewpoints, often emphasized by the media (and highlighted by politicians) during election years as a mode of differentiation between candidates and between political parties. However, the role of culture wars has not always been so tactical. As Professor Robert Self, an Associate Professor of History at Brown University suggests, “Somewhere around the late 1980s, and certainly by 1992, politicians and especially political consultants began to emphasize certain issues…that they knew were deeply emotional and would motivate voters and/ or generate coverage in the media.” Self refers to the shift in the role of culture wars in political campaigns following Pat Buchanan’s now notorious speech on the “cultural war for the soul of America” during the 1992 Republican National Convention.

Warning against the changes that Democratic Presidential nominee Bill Clinton proposed, Buchanan claimed: “The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

In his speech, Buchanan suggests that underlying the struggle to define and defend a certain set of cultural standards is the increasingly complex quest for both voters and candidates to define Americanism— to identify the core social values that differentiate America as a nation.

A familiar tone has crept back into the current Republican race. Gingrich’s

references to the race to the moon of 1969 harken back to a time when the US was globally visible as the leading superpower.

During his campaign speech, Gingrich explicitly lamented the decline of the nation’s space program: “I come at space from a standpoint of a romantic belief that it really is part of our destiny. It has been tragic to see what has happened to our space program over the last 30 years.” But underlying his ostensible focus, we might notice stronger parallels with Buchanan’s speech and wonder what other “tragedies” in America today, beyond the decline of the space program, (such as abortion and gay rights) may pose a threat to what Gingrich and his supporters see as “Real America” or “God’s Country.”

A recent Economist article goes as far as to reduce all of Gingrich’s main policies to attempts to re-affirm a stereotypical concept of “American-ness:” “Support for oil and gas exploration is American, period. Opposing it is European. Just like the argument over Obamacare is not really a debate over how to ensure that as many Americans as possible have access to affordable and at least adequate healthcare. Obamacare is ‘European socialism’; opposing it is American.”

As far as the traditional America of 1969 is concerned—the America of God, country, community, and family—this definition of US values summarizes many of the nation’s greatest concerns at the time.

However, as Self points out, there is a major difference between the nature of these values and the effectiveness of employing them occasionally in political discourse: “In earlier decades the issues we associate with ‘culture war’ …like abortion and gay rights were being fought out across the country, not because some political consultant decided they would mobilize a certain kind of voter, but because powerful social movements put those issues on the political agenda and they legitimately divided Americans.”

In 1969, when America landed the first man on the moon under Republican President Richard Nixon, unemployment was a mere 3.6 percent. Nixon’s domestic priority was law and order: his administration employed several vigorous policies designed to crack down on growing civil disturbances and demonstrations (particularly on college campuses), such as the Organized Crime Control Act and the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (enacted

in 1970). He eliminated many of the most prominent Great Society acts, such as the Office of Economic Opportunity and the War on Poverty agency, installed by his democratic predecessors in the 1960s.

As suggested by Nixon’s tough stance on law and order, the culture warriors of the late 1960s fought—both through rhetoric and policy changes—against anti-war protesters, or “America-hating hippies,” black militants and, perhaps the most threatening sect to traditional America and what Nixon called the “silent majority” of conservative Americans, liberal democrats.

The rise of these progressive groups followed the 1950s, arguably the reigning decade of traditional America: 69 percent of Americans were members of a church in 1960 and the US economy was enjoying a period of relative prosperity following the depression and war rationing. An unprecedented number of Americans were homeowners. Later, Nixon emphasized these traditional US values—seen as preeminent a mere 10 years earlier—as a solution to the crime and social disturbances that, to him and his supporters, characterized the America of the late 1960s.

A few decades later, during the presidential elections of the 1990s and 2000, the Republican Party employed similar tactics but, perhaps, for entirely different reasons. The Clinton-Gore presidency posed a new problem to the Grand Ole Party: the Democratic partnership appealed to a growing demographic of fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, voters. No longer able to attract voters based on its traditional label as the business-friendly party, the Republican party turned to culture wars and emphasized, as in 1969, traditional values (such as low taxation, welfare reform and law and order) as a solution to social ills like crime and welfare dependency.

So are culture wars thriving in 2012 America because of an increasing cleavage in social values, as seen in earlier elections, or because of an ever-shifting and newly converging voter demographic? As a report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) points out, “Millennials—the generation with birth years 1978 to 2000—support gay marriage, take race and gender equality as givens, are tolerant of religious and family diversity, have an open and positive attitude toward immigration, and generally display little interest in fighting over the divisive social issues of the past.” And these liberals

are gaining a foothold. A cultural index of voters’ opinions on social issues ranging from abortion to immigration designed by the CAP found that the demographics with more conservative views were the ones declining most rapidly as a proportion of the electorate. Meanwhile, the proportion of white college graduate voters and minority voters, considered more progressive, is increasing.

However, while this report argues that such an evident decline in Nixon’s silent majority will undermine culture wars and render them irrelevant, there is evidence (namely, the prominence of culture wars in this Republican race) to suggest that a converging electorate base will actually encourage Presidential candidates to highlight the erosion of traditional America—whether or not the majority of voters actually bemoan this erosion—in vain attempts to gain support.

When President Nixon first ran for president in 1968, his campaign emphasized culture wars, and he won. A large enough portion of the American electorate felt dissatisfaction with the state of US society strongly enough to elect a president with a focus on law and order. Today, while countless surveys establish the economy as voters’ primary issue of concern, Republicans continue to stress the erosion of traditional American society in their debates and addresses. This begs the question: are candidates exaggerating Americans’ concerns about the state of society or, worse, are they encouraging tensions that do not exist to a significant degree?

A 2009 CBS survey entitled “Polarization in America” found that 76 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of Independents want officials to compromise more and not stick to their traditional, ideological principles (including the cultural values they embrace). Indeed, with Rick Santorum out of the race, the way seems to be paved for Mitt Romney—the most socially moderate of the candidates—to claim the Republican nomination. Rather than recognizing a sense of nostalgia for a former, more traditional America among voters and attempting to provide a solution, candidates are now creating a sense of “tragedy” over a lost nation that most Americans would rather move beyond.

LAURA NOORANI B’14 will be on the moon, and will be American.

8 features

13 april 2012

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INSIDE ELOY Immigration, Imprisonment, and Abuse

by Emily Gogolak Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

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n hour south of Phoenix there is a narrow dirt road off Interstate 95.

It leads through rows upon rows of cropped green fields, a relief to the eyes in a desert that feels endless. The green stops, the desert begins again, and something appears in the distance on the right: giant blocks of concrete, towering light posts, barbed fences. A few small white trucks roam the perimeter of the sand behind a white sign that says: “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Eloy. Federal Contract Facility. US Department of Homeland Security.”

Each day, as many as one hundred newly detained immigrants are driven past this sign and into Eloy—a privately run immigration center—where they will remain until they are either deported or granted residence in the United States. But recent reports of what awaits detainees inside Eloy are causing concern, according to immigration advocates.

Ten detainees have died in custody since 2003—more deaths than any other detention facility nationwide. According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request, eight detainees at Eloy have come forward since 2007 with reports of sexual abuse while in custody. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Michelle Brané, Detention and Asylum Program Director at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “The concern is that the number of abuses and the degree of negligence is much, much higher than the number that is actually being reported.”

The most recent and the most public allegation out of Eloy comes from Tanya Guzman-Martinez, a 28-year old Mexican woman and former detainee who first passed through Eloy’s doors on September 29, 2009, and whose story—now the subject of a federal lawsuit against the facility—has since become emblematic of the questionable conditions of life inside privately-run US

immigration detention centers.

Guzman-Martinez was first arrested by immigration authorities in California after a probation violation, and was then sent to Arizona, where she would remain in detention at Eloy for the next seven and a half months.

But when Tanya Guzman-Martinez first left Mexico in 1999, she was known as Victor Guzman-Martinez. She was fleeing persecution based on her identity as a transgender woman. By the time of her detention, she had surgically altered her breasts, buttocks, hips, and legs to appear more feminine, and was in the process of taking hormones and estrogen injections to prepare for gender reassignment surgery.

Facilities like Eloy are essentially holding centers for immigrants while they await deportation or seek to appeal their case and remain in the US. When GuzmanMartinez arrived at Eloy, she immediately appealed her case and applied for asylum, for fear that if deported to Mexico she would face the same harassment and persecution from which she had fled. But harassment and abuse for Guzman-Martinez was a lot closer than across the border; while she waited to receive asylum, it would happen within the very walls of Eloy.

According to a complaint filed by the ACLU last December, upon her arrival at Eloy, Guzman-Martinez was immediately placed in a male housing unit—a barrack of cells filled with male detainees and staffed by male detention officers. It was in this housing unit where on December 7, 2009, Justin Manford, one of Guzman-Martinez’s detention officers, assaulted her. After cornering her, he forced her to watch him masturbate into a white styrofoam cup and then demanded that she ingest his ejaculated semen. According to the complaint, during the course of the assault Manford threatened Guzman-Martinez, telling her that he would lengthen her detention, lock her in “the hole,” or have her deported immediately if she did not follow his demands.

It wasn’t the first time Guzman-

Martinez had been threatened and harassed by this officer. Before the December 7 assault, Manford had frequently taunted her about her sexuality, asking her if she had boyfriends or if other inmates had seen her breasts.

Guzman-Martinez immediately reported her assault to Eloy detention staff and Manford was fired from the facility and eventually convicted in the Pinal County Superior Court for Attempted Unlawful Sexual Contact. Court records show that he was only sentenced to two days in prison.

After several weeks, Guzman-Martinez then filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security on February 26, 2010, and was notified that there would be an investigation into the assault, as well as detention policies and procedures at Eloy. To date GuzmanMartinez has not received the results of this investigation.

After the assault by Manford, GuzmanMartinez remained in an all-male housing unit, though she had requested a change; and after the assault, there would be more abuse for Guzman-Martinez at Eloy Detention Center. The next time, it would come from a male detainee, Johnny Pereira Vigil.

He had been harassing her for weeks, calling her “faggot,” following her into the bathroom and dressing room, and refusing to leave while she changed or used the toilet.

On April 23, 2010, seven months into her detention at Eloy and four months after the first reported assault, Vigil pushed GuzmanMartinez into a wall and groped her, and threatened that he and other detainees would physically harm her if she reported the incident.

Guzman-Martinez waited until May 4, 2010 to report the incident to local police, in fear of retaliation by other detainees and, according to the complaint, “because of the known failures of Eloy personnel to safeguard her from attacks by male detainees and guards.” Soon after Guzman-Martinez reported the incident, she was granted

asylum and released from the facility.

It’s 9AM on a Saturday in late March at Eloy. Visitation hours. Maximum capacity: 1596. Current occupancy: 1535. The parking lot is nearly full, with a short line in front of the security check; family, friends, and attorneys prepare to see detainees inside.

Some are turned away. A guard tells Jaime, a man waiting to see his brother, “No puede entrar.” He needs the detainee’s eight-digit alien identification number. The guard doesn’t tell him how to get it.

Others pass through security and into Eloy. They are allowed three hours, at most, to meet with detainees.

In late 2009, Attorney Victoria Lopez, Immigrant Rights Director at the ACLU of Arizona, passed through Eloy security to meet with Guzman-Martinez for the first time. Once she and the ACLU got wind of what happened in the December assault, the questions started. Why was Ms. GuzmanMartinez placed in an all-male housing unit from the start? Second, why didn’t Eloy personnel, after the report of the 2009 assault, recognize her vulnerability for abuse and make necessary changes?

“It’s not a surprise that LGBT detainees are targeted. So then why would someone like Tanya be placed in a male housing unit, where she is nearly guaranteed to be in a position of abuse?” Lopez asked.

At the end of last year, the ACLU brought this question to federal court, and on behalf of Guzman-Martinez filed a lawsuit against the corrections company and facility personnel on charges that they had failed to protect her from abusive male staff members at the facility in Eloy, even after being notified about the sexual assault and ongoing harassment by staff and other male detainees. The complaint states that the incidents were caused by officials’ “failure to implement reasonable procedures and follow the law and governing standards.”

But just what the standards are at Eloy is at the crux of Guzman-Martinez’s

features

the college hill independent

case, and the greater issue of conditions in privately run detention centers nationwide.

In the US — where there were nearly 400,000 immigration detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control almost half of all detention beds, compared with only eight percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures reported in the New York Times. As a privately run facility, Eloy operates under a contract between the Department of Homeland Security and Corrections Corporation of America, the largest operator of privatized prisons and detention facilities in the nation. It’s up to the private company to staff the prison and to Homeland Security to set and clarify the standards by which the facility must run. But, because contracts vary from center to center, the national landscape of immigration detention standards is patchwork at best.

“The problem with these standards is that they aren’t standardized,” said Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission.

She explained that there is a spectrum of standards in place at private immigration detention facilities, varying between National Performance-Based Standards set in 2000, 2008, and 2011, depending on the particular contract set between Homeland Security and the private contractor at that particular facility. This means little consistency in which detention standards are implemented across different detention facilities, and consequently greater room for confusion about what the standards actually are.

“We are seeing that there is a huge lack of understanding among the staff about standards and requirements. For example, in some counties sexual assault has occurred only if there has been a claim of penetration,” Brané said. “Both the staff and the detainees are confused at understanding what constitutes sexual abuse, and what to do when it happens.”

When asked which basic standards apply to Eloy, Bryan Martin, the center’s

Public Facilities Manager, hesitated. “Well, I can’t really talk about that. I’d have to send you over to my Q&A manager. She could give you a better idea.” When then asked about how he would best describe his position at Eloy, Martin said: “I’m in charge of initially training them and telling them, the officers, of what they are to do by the standard or not.”

By its contract, Eloy falls under the 2008 performance-based detention standards. These standards follow provisions set by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, including: “In matters of housing, recreation, and work assignments custody staff should be aware that transgender people are common targets for violence. Accordingly, appropriate safety measures should be taken, regardless of whether the individual is placed in male or female housing areas.”

American Correctional Association Standards, also incorporated into the 2008 standards that Eloy allegedly follows, provide that “Single occupancy cells/rooms are available when indicated for ... inmates likely to be exploited or victimized by others.” According to the ACLU, GuzmanMartinez was never provided with a single occupancy cell, even when she requested one.

Eloy also operates under a special standard set by Homeland Security on Sexual Abuse and Assault Prevention, which “sets a zero-tolerance standard regarding rape and sexual assault in any confinement facility.”

Holly Cooper, now an immigration law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, spent a decade in Arizona representing clients detained at Eloy. “Yes, there is a zerotolerance policy, but we haven’t seen how it is implemented,” she said. Manford, the guard who first assaulted Guzman-Martinez at Eloy, was fired; but the conditions that enabled her sexual assault—that she was immediately placed in an all-male housing unit and remained there even after the first assault—illustrate the failure of “zerotolerance” as a standard to protect detainees

from sexual abuse. In other words, the standard—implemented after the fact—does little in an environment already rife with opportunities for abuse. “In terms of there being an actual mechanism in place, there is not an adequate one,” Cooper said, “The system doesn’t work.”

The problem of inadequate standards and consequential abuse has garnered significant attention over the past year. Last April, the National Immigration Justice Center sent a complaint to the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of sexual minorities facing harassment and assault in immigration detention. In addition to facilities in California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, the complaint cited Eloy Detention Center, where a woman referred to as “T” claims she was sexually abused twice.

The letter called on Homeland Security to uphold constitutional standards in immigration detention centers, and punish guards that violate them. And according to Ivan Madrigal-Espinoza, a staff attorney for Lambda Legal who advocates for LGTB immigrants, “put the issue in the spotlight and launched a trend.” It brought the discussion about abuse and standards in immigration detention to Capitol Hill.

Following the reports of abuse, 30 members of Congress in December called on the investigative branch of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, to launch an inquiry into sexual abuse at U.S. immigration detention centers. In late January, an investigation was announced— and it is one that could have high stakes for the fight against sexual abuse in detention.

The investigation comes just as the Obama administration decides whether to include detainees, the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the country, in pending regulations on prison rape. The regulation under question is the Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed unanimously in Congress in 2003 and the first federal law

9

addressing the sexual assault of prisoners.

The law, however, does not cover prisoners who are not US citizens (i.e. immigrant detainees). The logic is that because the law was drafted by the Justice Department, immigration detention centers — which are overseen by Homeland Security—are exempt from the federal law. Homeland Security does not want to be forced to abide by a policy written by the Justice Department. As Chris Daley, deputy executive director of Just Detention International, put it: “We’re talking about men, women, children less protected because of petty policy politics.”

The Obama administration’s decision on whether to extend the law to immigration centers is expected in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, officials are keeping mum. “The rule is in draft form, subject to interagency collaboration, and we are not allowed to discuss its contents until the rule is final,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Adora Andy.

As for Guzman-Martinez’s case, lawyers are still waiting for the defendants to respond to the complaint. But Lopez, the ACLU attorney, already sees how GuzmanMartinez’s story is making an impact. “We are seeing that this brings to light an issue of something greater,” she said. “Again, Tanya is just one. Eloy is just one.”

Eloy personnel have declined to publicly comment on the complaint by Guzman-Martinez and the ACLU, except that they have “zero tolerance” for sexual misconduct. Back at the facility, an oversized white sign hangs above the door that leads past security. Large letters printed in royal blue cursive read: “Behind these doors are the finest correctional professionals in the United States!”

EMILY GOGOLAK B’12.5 is just one.

FEMEN-ISM

Ukrainian Women and the Future of Feminism

by Sophia Seawell Illustration by Robert Sandler

O

n March 31, tourists checking out the Eiffel Tower stumbled upon another sight entirely: several topless Ukrainian women with the words “Nudity is Freedom” painted on their arms and torsos, holding signs reading “Muslim women, let’s get naked.” The protestors were members of Femen, a feminist group based in the Ukraine, and their goal was to encourage Muslim women to stand up against Shari’a law and its dress codes. Reportedly, the protests ended peacefully, with applause from the crowd. Such a response must have been a welcome change from the arrests and abuses that Femen’s protests sometimes elicit—in fact, the group is so accustomed to negative reactions that paying fees and bailing members out of jail are factored into their budget.

Consistent protests have become the norm for Femen, which was founded in Kiev

by Anna Hustol in 2008. Hustol was 24 at the time—rumor has it the idea was born out of an all-girls pajama party. According to Hustol, there are roughly 25,000 supporters connected through online networks, about 300 active members, and 40 protestors.

Femen was founded specifically in response to the expanding sex industry in the Ukraine, but more broadly “to improve the lot of women in Ukraine’s maledominated, post-Soviet society.”

This task is by no means a straightforward one. Ukrainian women’s reputation for being “the most beautiful women in the world,” as vice-president Joe Biden said after a visit in 2009, in combination with free visa entry for Europeans and Americans, has led to a growing number of “sex-pats” traveling to the country to find their Ukrainian trophy wife or girlfriend. Predictably, “this often bleeds into a quest simply for easy sex— often among the marriage agencies, where men abuse the service, trying to meet and bed as many women in their short stay here as possible,” according to a 2009 Global Post article about the issue. The culture created by “sex-pats,” which Hustol describes as pervasive, made an obvious target for Femen.

“I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve spoken to a girl who was treated like trash by some sex tourist who has decided that Ukraine is his personal playground,” Hustol said in a GlobalComment interview. “It can degenerate into street harassment. Now, I’m not talking about foreigners who come here to work or study or whatever, I’m talking about those people who are deliberately here to take advantage of women.”

The fetishization and commodification of Ukrainian women comes with a set of symptoms that do nothing positive for women in Ukraine: Internet dating or marriage sites with names like “Ukrainian Brides,” one of the highest HIV rates in Europe, and the growth of the sex work industry, to name a few.

And before there was sex tourism, there was sex trafficking. Human trafficking of all kinds has long been a severe problem in Ukraine—an International Migration Organization (IMO) survey found that since 1991, approximately 117,000 Ukrainians had been forced into exploitative situations in Europe, the Middle East, and Russia.

Despite the severity of the problem, Ukraine’s government has taken insufficient action towards addressing the problem. A 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report found that there were “inadequate punishments imposed on both sex and labor trafficking offenders and a lack of effort to address official complicity in human trafficking” in Ukraine and that “the Government of Ukraine does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.” It is in response to this hostile political and social environment for Ukranian women that Femen stage their topless protests.

The group also extends its reach beyond Eastern Europe, protesting the lack of driving rights for Saudi women and the jailing of Iranian woman for adultery and complicity of murder. They even went on their very own ‘Euro Tour,’ in 2011, starting in October with a protest in Paris against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and finishing big in June with a protest against Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square of Vatican City.

If nothing else, daring to go bare in the Vatican shows Femen’s commitment to what they believe in. The decision to go global was not motivated purely by sisterhood or solidarity with foreign women. Hustol told GlobalComment that Femen chooses to confront men from other nations because they “come here with attitudes of utter entitlement, and that needs to change.”

And their beliefs are not limited to women’s rights. For example, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s visit to Ukraine warranted a protest. The 2014 Hockey World Cup also became a target when it selected Belarus, a country with a poor human rights record, to host the competition.

When GlobalComment asked Hustol if Femen would describe itself as a feminist organization, she replied, “No. We use eroticism in our approach and our dress.

That’s not sanctioned by feminism.”

Whether or not she intended it to, Hustol’s comment evoked a divide between secondwave feminism in the ‘60s and third-wave feminism, which began in the ‘80s. The third wave is often defined as a movement that views sex work, stripping, pornography, breast enhancements, reclaiming “slut,” wearing makeup, and shaving one’s legs as things that are not inherently oppositional to feminism, sometimes even defending or embracing them. This approach, which feminist theorist R. Claire Synder-Hall says “emphasizes an inclusive and nonjudgmental approach that refuses to police the boundaries of feminist political.” But it has come under fire from older, second-wave feminists of the ‘60s. Ariel Levy’s 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture argues that women are encouraged to objectify themselves in the name of choice and freedom of expression, critiquing the third-wave acceptance of actions that, in her view, play into the oppression of women rather than combating it.

Femen has received this kind of critique

for their topless protests, but they stand by their strategy. “We started out being dressed but we found nobody took any notice. I’m a big fan of taking off our clothes. It’s how we get attention for our views,” Alexandra Shevchenko, a 23 year-old economics student and active member of Femen told Reuters. Another defense of the strategy in the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review is that it “deliberately targets the male gaze in an attempt to increase the visibility of feminist issues among those populations least likely to problematize sex tourism.” That is, without clothing and with a physical presence in the public sphere, Femen is most likely to attract the attention of men, the targets of most of their protests.

Femen seems hyper-aware of how to attract men’s (and the media’s) attention— popular images of Femen protests could easily be confused with a bizarre America’s Next Top Model shoot. The women present at the protests, the faces of Femen, are all traditionally beautiful: thin, tall, toned, with flowing locks and flawless complexions. One scholar theorizes that “by limiting the ‘cast’ of performers in the show to a slim, trim troupe of 20 or so, Hutsol preserves their celebrity status and bolsters their marketability.” This, too, plays into Levy’s argument against thirdwavers who view their sexuality as a source of power. Conversely, some have argued the importance of Femen’s sexual appeal, intended to stand in contrast to “a growing neo-conservative strain in post-socialist society.” Hustol hopes that their protests will spark the sexual revolution that Ukraine “never had.”

But Hustol has also admitted that “the way we present our message and the message itself … contradict each other,” a contradiction which has not been lost on Femen’s critics. Some view the issue through Audre Lorde’s theory that the tools of the master (in this case, objectification of women) will never dismantle the master’s house (oppression based on objectification).

The same debate took place over SlutWalk, a series of protests centered on the reclamation of the word “slut,” in which clothing was often used to this effect. The author of an article about SlutWalk in this paper described herself as “a feminist fed-up with the ubiquity of sex-positive demonstration and craving a more sophisticated, or at least different, form of feminist activism.”

And she was by no means alone in her opinion—Rebecca Traister of the New York Times wrote that “to object to these ugly characterizations is right and righteous. But to do so while dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.”

The reception within Ukraine is similarly mixed. At the very least, Femen is on the radar: at the beginning of a lecture on feminism, Ukrainian gender studies expert Tetyana Bureychak asked her students at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University what associations they had with the term and “one of the first replies was Femen,” she told the Guardian. In an ABC news

article, Ukrainian feminist scholar Oksana Kis called this “extreme popularity” Femen’s “only visible achievement,” adding that “it looks like the real goal is their selfpromotion.”

The question of whether visibility and awareness are in and of themselves sufficient to spark social change is key in a time when the Internet has allowed social activism to become a simple, one-click action, whether through sharing a link (Kony 2012), signing a petition, or watching a video clip. In 2010, Femen began to focus on creating and sharing images of the protests almost more than the protests themselves—ten-minute protests resulted in dozens of photos and videos. Articles detailing the protests or information about Femen and its goals, on the other hand, are scarce.

“It’s okay to shock society in order to raise the issue, but when public nudity becomes the only way to deliver a message— it’s more than strange,” Kis said. “And the message itself seems to get lost while media focus on their nakedness.” But Hustol, who has a background in marketing, favors this “combination of new media and creativity in the name of deeply troubling issues” over “feminist theory, history, and cultural studies,” as a way of sending a message to society, telling an interviewer she was disengaged from “the academy.”

On its Myspace page, Femen says it “[plans] to become the biggest and the most influential feminist movement in Europe.” But Femen is not as respected within Ukraine as it is known, and it is not as known outside of Europe as it is within it. To spark a unified movement may contradict how Femen does business—the attention they receive relies heavily on their public sexual image, which is also their main source of criticism, their Achilles heel.

“Even the journalists have no qualms about calling us prostitutes,” Inna Schevchenko, a spokesperson for Femen, told Café Babel in an interview. “People often have trouble understanding it.” But to abandon their style of protesting would be to abandon the platform from which they speak. It seems to boil down to one question: for feminism to move forward, is it more important to be seen, or to be heard?

SOPHIA SEAWELL B’14 has not yet attended an all-girl pajama party.

12 arts

13 april 2012

K U LT U R PA R K

Investigating Creative Potential in an Abandoned Amusement Park

by John White Illustration by Olivia Fialkow

A

ferris wheel looms above the treetops; a roller coaster track snakes through the overgrowth of an encroaching forest; tipped-over dinosaurs lie motionless on the ground. Nestled in southeast Berlin along the Spree River lies an abandoned amusement park. The park, named Spreepark, has fallen into disrepair since it closed in 2001. Among the strange quiet, echoes of the park’s past life can sometimes be heard as the old rides creak and visitors play inside them. Despite its disrepair, Spreepark has not fallen into disuse.

Knowledge of the abandoned Spreepark has been spreading by word of mouth for years, and adventurers from Berlin and all over the world have been jumping the park’s fence to gain admittance to this creepy wonderland— the graffitied swan boats a testament to the new forms of amusement it provides.

In 2007, American artists/curators George Scheer and Stephanie Sherman heard about the park while in Berlin and decided to jump the fence. The two explored the park and, before being kicked out by its main security guard, saw great potential for the space, which, though abandoned, still has a lot of life and energy and which has seen both Berlin’s historically rich past and its rapidly developing present. Four and a half years later, they have assembled a production team that will bring the park back to life with their investigatory project Kulturpark.

In June, 30 Berlin-based artists selected through an application process will use the park as their collaborative studio and the park’s contents as their materials to create site-specific artworks. Kulturpark will, according to its website, “investigate the park as a site for cultural imagination; connect communities; instigate physical, social, and collaborative movement; and propose a future for the park.” The reimagined Kulturpark will open to the public to coincide with the end of the Berlin Biennale, a major international forum for contemporary art, which will help bring Kulturpark’s localized investigation and findings to a global audience.

Spreepark’s history dates back to 1969, when it was opened as Kulturpark Plänterwald. It was the only entertainment park in what was then the German Democratic Republic. The original Kulturpark became a site for social and cultural exchange among East Berliners, where western phenomena like punk were given a designated space for expression.

After the the reunification of Germany in 1989, the park was bought by the family company Spreepark GmbH, owned by the carnival operator Norbert Witte. Witte renamed the park Spreepark and built and renovated rides, modeling it after the Western idea of an amusement park. The park reopened in 1991. However, economic

downturn, a steadily increasing admission price, and limited parking eventually caused the park to go bankrupt in 2001.

Proposing a new type of creative space within an abandoned amusement park isn’t much of a stretch for Scheer and Sherman, who co-founded and co-direct a living museum and international residency program called Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina. Set in a former thrift store, Elsewhere invites artists from around the world to make artworks out of its diverse and abundant materials, which Scheer refers to as “material cultural surpluses.”

Kulturpark’s curatorial team is rounded out by Agustina Woodgate, a Miamibased, Argentinian artist who was once an artist-in-residence at Elsewhere, and Anthony Spinello. a friend of Woodgate’s and the creator of Spinello Projects, a Miami-based gallery devoted to unorthodox and experimental artists. “Anthony and I have a great partnership,” Woodgate told the Independent. “Similarly, when I met Stephanie and George I felt like I’d known them for a while. Anthony visited me during my residency, and the four of us connected.

We are all very much in that line of finding how art can be inclusive—reaching people and teaching them about creativity.”

In 2009, the group received an international research grant from the foundation Art Matters. The grant permitted Scheer and Sherman to return to the abandoned Spreepark with Woodgate and Spinello, as well as members of an expanded production team. in the summer of 2010.

The group, collectively called Musement, met with Berliners who had experiences with the park during and after its operation in order to explore the park’s social, political, economic, ecological, and visual dimensions.

Musement returned to Spreepark last summer to negotiate a deal with the Witte family, which still owns the space. It has has previously been used for fashion photo shoots and as a setting for last year’s action thriller film Hanna, among other things.

A “Call for Visions” was then released last fall to invite Berlin-based artists to propose projects that would activate the landscape. In January, an international jury, together with Kulturpark’s production team, selected 30 artists (referred to as Visionaries), to whom Spreepark’s many stories have since been related as a means of sparking thought and discussion about its potential uses.

Proposing a new type of creative space within an abandoned amusement park also isn’t much of a stretch for Berlin, which was the site of last year’s Tempelhof Design Competition. The competition received 78 proposals for the abandoned Tempelhof Airport. The winning design consisted of a park, complete with a 60-meter-high rock climbing wall. Kulturpark features a far more collaborative process. However, both

speak to Berlin’s concern for transforming and revitalizing public spaces in creative, mindful, and useful ways.

process looked more at their approach and how responsible it was. “We received some applications which were using the space to create, say, a giant sculpture that would not be relevant to the site. But it’s not about your For now, Spreepark lies in wait until sculpture, it’s about the park.”

Kulturpark’s Visionaries get to work in June.

That concern for using art as a tool During a three-week creative residency, the to react to and communicate with the site artists will live and work from a boat on the rather than as a commodity manifests itself Spree River docked near the amusement particularly in Kulturpark’s several proposals park, using the park as their collaborative for workshops and other less installationworkspace and its contents as their materials. based works, which will act as platforms Their works will be installed in the third for gathering and exchanging information. week. In a promotional video, artist Jay For instance, the park’s now-defunct Futuro Cousins gives insight into what might be House, a UFO-shaped dwelling made expected: “There’s a number of visions that in 1968, will broadcast and collect local this place stimulates. We’ve been doing a stories, memories, and histories. Workshops lot of stuff with bikes, so we want to explore will invite the public to participate in rehow we can make some of these rides mobile envisioning and redesigning the park for or how we might animate them kinetically future use. using people power.” Kulturpark will open from June 28 to 31 to coincide with the final weekend of the Berlin Biennale. The park’s As a project investigating potential futures, train, its only still-functioning ride, will carry Kulturpark’s findings—and the future of visitors throughout the exhibition, which Spreepark—are hard to gauge in advance. will include lectures, music, and films.

Part of Kulturpark’s process will involve a Though the two events will coincide, ten-day culture exchange program which Kulturpark has a very different purpose than will host an international group of students, the Biennale. As its subtitle—Investigating community representatives, and artists and Plänterwald Berlin—indicates, Kulturpark is architects from Germany and the United first and foremost a research-based project.

States to explore site-specific social practice The extensive, ongoing inquiry of the and perform public research. The group will project’s production team into Kulturpark’s create an online publication that will collect past and current identities and context all of Kulturpark’s research and include ideas within Berlin ensures that the project’s focus on how the space can be utilized by others remain communication with the site. An after Kulturpark. important part of this goal was inviting only After that, Kulturpark intends to artists who are based in Berlin. “A lot of the submit its final plans to international design artists who applied talked about the park competitions and secure enough funding from when they were kids,” Woodgate said. to maintain the park as a common creative “Some were born elsewhere, but we’ve been space. Woodgate, however, emphasizes the careful to get an interesting mix of people importance of taking things step by step. who are living in and thinking about their “Kulturpark is mainly acting as a catalyst— own city. It feels a lot more special than bringing together these international groups using people from all over the world who to think about the potential for this type of may not have a connection.” space is the main goal,” she said. “And who The idea of foreign directors and doesn’t have a memory in an amusement partially foreign-born artists trying park? Even if you haven’t been to Spreepark, to connect with the site may seem it brings you to your own one.” Though counterintuitive, but, as Chris Lineberry localized within Berlin, Kulturpark hopes of Kulturpark’s production team told the to connect global cultures and communities, Independent, “relationships to Berlin are drawing on the universality of amusement much more varied than they once were. This, park memories to suggest the potential for in turn, diversifies the project’s perspective. new public creative spaces worldwide.

The very notion of today’s ‘Berlin-based’ is uniform only by location.” Kulturpark hopes JOHN WHITE B’14 is #based in Berlin. to rehabilitate Spreepark, bridging its power as a relic of Berlin’s cultural past with the intensely globalizing Berlin of today. “To many the site is sacred,” Lineberry said, “and we hope to preserve that while maintaining broad accessibility.”

In that vein, Kulturpark’s production team aims to alter the park as little—or, at least, as cautiously—as possible. A lot of the Visionaries don’t have experience with public art, but Woodgate said that the selection

the college hill independent

opinions

13

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE What of it?

by Stephen Carmody Illustration by Robert Sandler

I 1: Here are the major contentions against the essence of religion: 1. Religion can and has inspired religiously motivated acts of violence, like the Crusades.

2. Religion denies the problems of the world, and only focuses on the afterlife. In the words of Marx, it’s the “opium of the people.”

3. Religions are predetermined and unmalleable belief systems.

4. Religion is just a “primitive” form of Science 5. Religion divides humanity, claiming salvation only for the believer.

6. Religion “requires faith,” which carries the connotation that religion is irrational or delusional.

2: Criticism from the inside means something quite different than criticism from the outside. The first time you criticize your parents, its important and difficult.

When someone else criticizes your parents, its offensive and unwarranted. The criticism could be exactly the same in content.

3: To be clear, most of the time that “religion” is criticized in this country, usually it’s Christianity that is being criticized. And the model of Christianity taken into account usually is a combination of the zeal of conservative evangelicals and Catholics.

4: Here are a few plainspoken examples: A middle-aged man helps a college student move into a new apartment, which is comforting and gratefully accepted. But when the student’s roommate mentions that he was checking the student out, the act of goodwill becomes suspect, motivated by desire.

A political leader’s much-needed welfare policy is portrayed as an attempt to buy the votes of lower-class citizens.

A newspaper reporter’s glowing analysis of a new company becomes questionable when it comes to light that the reporter’s husband works for the company.

would like to see the public discourse over religion shift. At present, small ideological factions in this country, that is, ardent liberal atheists and evangelical Christians, dominate the argument in the media. This cacophony of voices returns to a consistent set of issues—religion’s role in governance, reproductive health, social morality—without doing more than reinforce the apparent divide. In the urban Northeast, where religion rarely enters everyday conversation, the huge swaths of America fostering strong religious perspective seem distant, geographically and culturally. A liberal in the Northeast can read Richard Dawkins in his free time, post the usual “keep your religion out of my government” comment on an online New York Times article, and carry on unchallenged by religion.1 The problem with the outrage towards religion fostered by liberal atheists is that their picture of religion and its adherents is not representative. As these outside critiques against religion seep into our everyday thoughts, so too does a skewed picture of religion.2 And the distrust and fear of religion I sense in atheist attacks—coupled with an absence of regular encounters with religion—undermines one’s ability to recognize and engage with the ways religion can contribute to our shared humanity.

INACCESSIBLE MINDS The atheist’s fear comes from the perception that religious belief is inaccessible to the non-believer.3 It goes beyond not knowing the tenets or dogmas of a belief system, to the question of how these tenets can ever be believed. The outsider to religion realizes that the religious believer’s mind operates with a different set of rules. Instead of offering a rational account for one’s actions, the religious believer does something because “my faith told me so,” or “the Bible says.” It is terrifying to hear that George W. Bush said in 2005, “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.” Does it also unsettle to hear Jeremy Lin or Tim Tebow thanking God at every available media opportunity?

In general, people are skeptical of individuals who operate under a different set of rules than their own. If one surmises that a person is (even temporarily) motivated by erotic desire, power, or greed, it brings that person’s actions into question.4 People consider religion in the same way.

The problem I see with this distrust of religion is twofold: one, it delegitimizes a person’s actions (which perhaps have good results) and the person wholesale. Two aspects of the human range of emotions, motivations, and thinking are sectioned off from public expression. In doing so, we fail to reckon with these complex aspects of our humanity—rather, they serve as an intractable dividing line between believers and non-believers. It’s not about finding out that we’re not so different after all. People are different, but we still have to live.

LOUD VOICES Strange things happen when nonreligious voices assess religious belief. These voices love to point to discrepancies between a religion’s purported beliefs and the religious individual’s actions. How can conservative Christians, who assert that God gave the Earth to humankind, do nothing about global climate change? How can Newt Gingrich, who lauds Christian family values, cheat on his wives repeatedly?

Like most accusations of hypocrisy, these do more to reinforce the accuser’s perspective than engage in any form of dialogue with the accused. But more

importantly, they paint a picture of religion that does not apply for most religious people.

First, the accusations assume that religious beliefs must hold some pristine place in the believer’s mind. Rather than being one of a person’s many motivations, belief is seen as the only one. Second, the accusations do not acknowledge any flexibility to the belief system itself. As recently came up in the debate about publicly funded contraception, a vast majority of Catholic women have used contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute, in contradiction to official church ruling. But this does not undermine their personal identification as Catholic.

Behind these accusations of hypocrisy is an understanding of religion as only about belief.5 PRACTICING BODIES Using Christianity as an example, there’s a way to re-orient this discussion of religion generally. Christianity’s most radical and distinct contribution to religion is a twofold ethical imperative: love for the enemy and Christian service. Both caring about the humanity of even our adversary and caring for the poor and disempowered are parts of the ethical world that I would like to live in, even while I don’t claim to be Christian.

Both of these imperatives are bound to action in the real world. And both of these ideals are extremely difficult to maintain.

Religious worship is one of the only times in a person’s week when she stands in the midst of others, sings the same songs, says the same words, and moves her body like everyone else. It’s a strange and powerful sensation. Religion also is a rare outlet to intentional community. Put together, religious practice becomes a means for reinforcing one’s commitment and motivation for a more positive ideal.

Religion can serve as a gathering point for social practice. I see what happened in Latin America to Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s as the paradigm of this. The poor from many countries came together— inspired by powerful, radical reading of Jesus’ message and their continual service to each other—to make real, difficult, and meaningful change. In this case, even among the conservative structures of the Catholic Church and the brutal crackdowns by the government, the oppressed were able to find through religion a manner of taking on their reality.6 But religion as social practice can operate in the more mundane situations. I used to attend a Bible study of a Christian conservative woman and her family. While I disagreed with much of their reading, I also realized how coming together to read a Gospel gave her the language and reflective space to seek the forgiveness of someone she had wronged.

Speaking of religion in terms of practice, action, and effect reorients the ethical judgment of religion’s role in society. It’s a generous position that our public conversation needs. For behind the loud voices that dominate the argument around religion—from public intellectuals to religious leaders—are billions of people interpreting their lives. People are living religion to deal with their impending mortality, the fragility of emotions, and the injustice that pervades the human project.

And if one wishes to take religion to task, it cannot be done without taking these human realities into account.

STEPHEN CARMODY B’12 is the opium of the poeple.

5: One of the critical interventions made by the study of religion in the academy is to show how Enlightenment ideals of reasoning, combined with a Protestant focus on belief over religious practice, reinforces a general perception of religion as all about belief. Instead of asking, “what does religion believe?” one might ask, “what does religion do?”

6: Gustavo Gutierrez, a liberation theologian from Peru, wrote, “The liberation of our continent […] is to see humanity in search of a qualitatively different society in which it will be free from all servitude, in which it will be the artisan of its own destiny. It is to seek the building up of a new humanity.”

14 science

13 april 2012

UNRAVELLING HIGGSTERIA The Agony and the Ecstasy of the God Particle

by Raillan Brooks Illustration by Annika Finne

F

our years ago, Mike Wade at the Times reported that Stephen Hawking bet Peter Higgs $100 that Higgs and thousands of scientists would return from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, emptyhanded. It was just a lighthearted kick-up between two of physics’ most respected greybeards, but it found its way into the press. Hawking’s hundred-dollar wager felt particularly cheeky coming on the heels of the LHC’s completion, which represented $9 billion already spent in search of the Higgs boson, a theoretical elementary particle.

That chunk of change, coming from the coffers of the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) 20 member nations, seems like a ludicrous amount to spend in search of such a small thing.

But finding it would make many particle physicists very, very happy. The discovery of the Higgs boson would settle the debate surrounding the Standard Model of particle physics, the overarching paradigm that has dominated theoretical physics research for nearly 50 years. The model provides the means by which to explain a range of fundamental physical phenomena: how atomic nuclei stay together, what the subatomic processes are that lead to radioactive decay, and even the conditions of the cosmos in the moments directly following the Big Bang.

However, scientists have been unable to cement the Standard Model’s place as the end-all-be-all framework for thinking about the universe, because it doesn’t give a reason for why anything in the universe has mass.

According to basic cosmological models, all matter in the universe directly following the Big Bang was totally massless. The fact that we observe subatomic particles—and everything built out of them—to have mass means that a switch was flipped in the primordial soup of the early universe that gave subatomic particles the measurable masses they have today. In 1964, Higgs and five other theoretical physicists in the US and the UK authored a set of papers in which they suggested the existence of an elementary particle that interacts with

the non-exotic subatomic particles—what we think of as the basic constituents of matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons— giving them the masses we can observe directly. Much in the way that photons can be thought of as tiny mediators of electromagnetic force, the theoretical particle would mediate mass. The particle, the Higgs boson, resolves the absurd result of a massless universe predicted by the Standard Model, and its existence would vindicate decades of research and extraordinary spending on the part of no fewer than 111 national governments. The particle’s significance has earned it the moniker “God particle,” the magic bullet that unifies all of physics.

BREAKING NEWS In 2009, reports began to emerge that the LHC, after having been under construction for 10 years, had fatal design flaws, and that the hunt for the Higgs boson might be over before it even began. Media interest picked up. For the first time, writers and researchers alike acknowledged that four decades and tons of cash may have been spent in vain.

An electrical short caused an explosion in the side of the accelerator, causing liquid helium to spill out and setting back a start date by several months. Journalists seized on the melodrama. Jeff Brumfiel of Nature wrote “broken magnets put particle collider in limbo.” CNN’s Elizabeth Landau posed the question: “Is the Large Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future?” Later that year, a bird carried a piece of bread into the accelerator, delaying operations until the end of 2010. There were 20 separate stories and blog posts from Time, the Guardian, and a host of popular science outlets.

Even Peter Higgs himself said that the recent reportage of the hunt for the God particle’s existence had been overblown. In interviews given to Prospect Magazine in November and December 2011, Higgs, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh and one of the authors of the 1964 paper that first theorized the existence of the elementary particle that would come to bear his name, pointed out that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

had done itself a disservice by letting news outlets spill so much ink to turn the search for the Higgs boson into a veritable grail quest, echoing the lament of other researchers that media had overshadowed other projects at the LHC. “I think that it’s being realised that they need to devote more publicity to the other things that they do there.”

In the two years since the LHC became fully operational, reporters’ zeal in covering the search for the God particle—a term that Higgs apparently loathes—has landed in science columns around the world. Ranging from the breathless “A Smashing Year for Physics” to the tortured “God Particle Goes Missing,” each headline is more delirious than the last. This is “Higgsteria”­—a term coined by University College London physicist Mark Lancaster for the media frenzy that has been whipping up public imagination as scientists close in on the particle that has dogged them since Higgs first put pen to paper to describe the putative particle in the 1960s.

Maybe the reason behind Higgsteria is a simple one. Never mind the tremendous scientific consequences of a discovery, or its implications for future global research efforts. It is perhaps the thrill of seeing what technology can achieve, the awesome possibilities found in a machine capable of firing projectiles that move at near-light speeds or of pushing the very boundaries of physical reality—however remote the chance.

Indeed, researchers at the LHC are no strangers to sensational media coverage. In 2009, not long after the LHC’s completion, there was some serious nailbiting when calculations done by physicists at Cornell University revealed that the particle accelerator had enough power to create miniature black holes with enough destructive power to swallow Earth.

Even though CERN swiftly debunked the concern with a series of safety reports, the fear that the LHC had the power to produce doomsday phenomena escalated to the point that two lawsuits were brought before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, seeking

injunctions to stop operations at CERN indefinitely, or until it could be shown conclusively that no black hole the LHC creates—which, for the record, is actually possible—is big enough to annihilate the planet. Later, more safety reports confirmed that any black holes that emerge would be microscopic and would evaporate long before it could cause Armageddon.

PROBABLY PROBABILITIES The latest ballyhoo to hit newsstands came out of the recently shuttered Tevatron accelerator, housed at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, in early March 2012, when the most accurate estimates of the Higgs boson’s mass to-date were released (these are not in fact direct measurements of the Higgs boson, but measurements of the presence of the particles that the Higgs boson is thought to decay into.) The Higgs boson might actually exist, as the collection of approximations arrived at by scientists continues to home in on the particle’s actual mass. Fermilab announced that the bell curve of possible masses for the Higgs boson had narrowed to a mere three giga-electron volts (GeV), its true mass hovering around 126 GeV, or about 126 times the mass of a proton.

Past estimates have given spreads of up to 20 GeV, a number researchers have been able to whittle down, slowly but surely. The constant downward pressure on uncertainty levels has served to strengthen the likelihood of the particle’s existence. Still, Fermilab researchers were careful to pull their punches. “If you discover there is some particle at 120GeV, to be absolutely sure it is the Standard Model Higgs which we think it is, one would have to measure precisely how it is produced and how it decays to determine its properties. That’s quite a way down the road because, for that, you need much more data,” Tevatron researcher and University of Manchester physicist Stefan Söldner-Rembold told the Guardian in a press release accompanying Fermilab’s announcement.

In fact, all results building up to this most recent announcement have come in the form of statistical distributions. Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia

the college hill independent

University, put it this way in a column directly following a similar announcement from CERN last December: “[It is] sort of like the chance of getting eight to nine heads in a row when you flip a coin; the protocol for claiming a definitive discovery is more like one in a million, similar to getting heads about 20 times in a row.” Basically, there is a non-negligible chance that these results are a fluke. Furthermore, the question of whether the Higgs boson and its mechanism are even the right answer to the problem of the Standard Model has not been sewn up. Meenakshi Narain, a professor of physics at Brown University and member of the team at Tevatron since 1991, says that the Higgs-corrected Standard Model is the strongest contender for a Theory of Everything, but she is careful to note that there are a number of other competing theories that have the same explanatory power. Only the Higgs boson operates at testable energies. And so, says Narain, “that’s

science

where the billions of dollars get justified.”

And even if the Higgs boson is found, a bona fide Theory of Everything might still be far off. The Standard Model in its current form does not incorporate a mechanism for explaining why gravity is so much weaker than other fundamental forces, nor does it adequately address the existence of dark matter, unobservable matter that accounts for over 80% of all mass in the universe.

These are among the questions already under investigation at the LHC, far from the limelight occupied by the Higgs boson.

KEY FOCUS There is a practical side to the hype.

How does one fund the construction and operation of the world’s largest particle accelerator? The LHC is nearly 17 miles in circumference and uses so much energy that Switzerland, CERN’s host nation, commands that the apparatus be shut down during the winter months in order for

there to be enough power to heat homes in the landlocked country. By energizing governments enough to include the Higgs boson on their research agendas, CERN may be able to spare itself the fate that befell Tevatron, which had to close last September due to a lack of funds. In his interview with Prospect, Higgs sees both the benefit and the risk of Higgsteria when it comes to those who pull the purse strings. “I think they talked up the search for the Higgs boson too much—so much so that they were in danger of having their paymasters say, ‘Oh, well, you’ve found it now, you don’t need to run that expensive machine any more, do you?’”

To many in pursuit of the Higgs boson, the real questions come into play in the days after it is discovered or definitively disproved. After that Eureka moment, researchers at CERN plan to dig deep into other processes that governed the creation of matter in the early universe, and what those models might look like. Physicist Jon

15

Butterworth at University College London noted in a BBC article in early March that “even for people like [him] the Higgs is just the first thing on the to-do list.” Items on the agenda include exploring exotic states of matter, searching for new elements, and experimenting with collisions at higher and higher energies just to see what comes out. On April 5, CERN announced that it had increased collision energies by about fifteen percent. These higher energies allow for stranger particle interactions to emerge, providing richer data for analyzing the fundamentals of the cosmos. But for now, the energy increase is in the service of narrowing the Higgs boson probability distribution. The BBC reports: “In the 2012 run of experiments, the Higgs will be a key focus.”

RAILLAN BROOKS B’13 goes round and round and round and round and round.

16

food

13 april 2012

TALL BOYS

Mark Hellendrung Gets the Beer Back

by Ben Wolkon Illustration by Diane Zhou

M

ark Hellendrung is on the road.

The CEO of Narragansett Beer Co. has built a company back up by interacting face-to-face with customers and media, but lately he has been using his cell phone to talk to people while traveling in search of a Rhode Island home for the brewery.

The precise location of the future brewery remains undecided. Hellendrung has toured six locations in Pawtucket (home of the world famous Pawtucket Beer Festival) as well as the old Capital Records building and the CJ Fox building in Providence, and the American Tourister building in Warren. He wants to brew in the Rhode Island location that consumes the most Narragansett—“drinks their part,” as he puts it. Erecting the brewery in any part of the state will mark a long awaited homecoming.

One hundred and twenty three years ago, six German immigrants in Rhode Island chose to brew a lager at a time when most beer makers in America produced ale. Ale was easier to produce with the available technology of the era, but in 1891 the original six Narragansett brewers made 28,000 barrels of lager. It was unconventional, but they used what they knew from back home to make an American business. Within twenty-five years their company had become the largest brewery in New England.

The fact that Narragansett was the first beer to partake in large scale canning is only one example of how the company led the industry in the early 20th century. The old brewery in Cranston was a state-of-theart establishment that included a barn, a stable, a blacksmith, 75 horses, 45 wagons, trucks powered by gas and electricity, 25 refrigerated train cars and its own ice plant. During prohibition, the company cut a special plan with the medical community so that it could continue to brew beer as a prescription drug. Its innovation kept the company ahead of the game.

Narragansett’s marketing was just as cutting edge as its brewery. The company hired Dr. Seuss to create a Narragansett mascot named Chief Gansett, and the first beer commercials in the history of American sports programming were marked by the slogan “Hi neighbor, have a ‘Gansett!”

These advertisements were key in making Narragansett a fan favorite among supporters of the Boston Braves and later the Red Sox. But growth and innovation could not last forever. The mid 1960’s marked the beginning of a decades-long decline for Narragansett. It was a time in which new marketing techniques allowed large companies to reach customers all over the country, but the US

government’s issue of an anti-trust lawsuit against Falstaff—the company that had just purchased Narragansett—led to financial cutbacks in advertising, rather than expansion.

Meanwhile Budweiser was reaching the whole country from its home in St. Louis as it released television ads with colorfully dressed choirs and the Budweiser logo superimposed on maps of America. “Hi Neighbor, have a ‘Gansett!” was no longer the jingle stuck in the idle heads of baseball fans as they began to more frequently hear, “The king of beers is leading all the rest! When you say Budweiser, you’ve said it all!” Budweiser’s competition further ousted Narragansett in the 1970’s when it opened a new facility one hundred miles from Narragansett’s Cranston brewery. By the beginning of the 1980’s, Narragansett had laid off over three hundred workers and relocated to Fort Wayne, Indiana where it could slow and cheapen brewing operations.

While Narragansett was packing up to leave Rhode Island, its future CEO Mark Hellendrung was attending East Providence public schools and playing baseball. He stayed local for college, serving as the captain of Brown’s baseball team. He spent the decade after he graduated gaining experience in professional services networks and beverage companies and by 1999 he was the president of Nantucket Nectars. He then took a job as head of sales at Magic Hat Brewery in Vermont before leaving that company for a short stint in unemployment.

It was then that he was sitting in a bar in Boston and heard somebody recalling the old Curt Gowdy Narragansett commercials on Red Sox radio.

“Shit man, I haven’t heard of Narragansett in a long time,” he recalls saying.

A moment’s pleasant recollection of an old brand did not suffice for Hellendrung. The combination of his joblessness, interest in beer and fond childhood memories of Narragansett commercials made him curious about where the company had gone, and he began doing some research. He found out about how the company had been bought out and withered down because its new owners failed to continue the company’s tradition of innovation.

“This brewery didn’t deserve the fate that it got,” he said. By the following year, he had teamed up with a group of New England investors to purchase and revitalize Narragansett, an operation he calls Getting The Beer Back.

Getting The Beer Back starts with quality. Narragansett’s move to Indiana was

marked by a recipe dilution in an attempt to save money. When Hellendrung bought the near-dead company from Falstaff in 2005, he called a man named Bill Anderson, a retired brewer who held the original Narragansett recipe, and they worked together to restore the beer to its original quality.

Getting The Beer Back thrives on marketing. The same marketing from half a century ago that promoted the beer in a way that would attract the crowds but maintain a local touch. Hellendrung was concerned that the “Hi, Neighbor!” slogan would seem too old fashioned for “all the knuckleheads who just grab a thirty pack of Bud,” but soon decided that he would rather stand by company principles and familiar marketing with a neighborhood appeal.

Regardless of his company’s size, Hellendrung remains in touch with consumers. A visitor to the company’s website will find the “Gansett Girl Of The Week” photo collection, which does not feature professional models, but rather Rhode Island women profiled in sarcastically sexy modeling shoots underscored by retro clothing fashions, and the consumption of Narragansett beer. The page crafts an image of irony and humor that appeals to the common customer and offers an alternative to the unrealistic nature of larger beer companies’ marketing campaigns.

The Narragansett counterculture of upholding the simple and the local goes against national trends of expanding corporations with large-scale marketing campaigns, and has a special appeal to Narragansett drinkers. They feel like they know who they are buying from. Hellendrung has previously arranged for Narragansett to hold chowder festivals and pitch tournaments (a card game that he insists nobody outside of New England knows about), and the Narragansett website blogs about employees taking weekend ice fishing trips to Maine. He is also responsive

to consumer feedback.

“I mean just yesterday I got this really long email from a woman who’s passionate about Narragansett outlining thirty things that could be improved on our website… she just wanted to help out! And you know what? These things had sort of been bothering me too! I sent it to my marketing guy this morning and I was like man what the fuck? Let’s get this shit fixed!”

When customers claim to have bought stale Narragansett from a specific liquor store, Hellendrung takes a trip to that liquor store to see if it sells expired beer. Shortly before Valentines Day, he took an off-hand employee suggestion to have Narragansett’s mascot, Tall Boy (who has long been the politically correct replacement of Chief Gansett) deliver a dozen roses and a six-pack to the sweetheart of a randomly selected Narragansett supporter on Twitter. By reverting to the old aesthetic of connecting with real local beer drinkers, but using today’s new technological means of interaction, Hellendrung has begun to reestablish Narragansett’s regional stronghold.

The final step in revitalizing the Narragansett brand will be returning brewing operations to Rhode Island, and this dream will be realized by the end of the year. The $1 million investment will bring the first Narragansett brewers to Rhode Island in decades.

Narragansett can relate to the economic struggles that Rhode Island faces today. A once flourishing economy is now desperate for job creation and increased revenue. But universities are reluctant to increase their payments to Providence, restaurant owners do not want increased taxation, and port expansions require tremendous investments of time and money. Narragansett knows this economy could use some businesses that connect with the community—businesses whose products are, as each Narragansett can says, “Made on honor, sold on merit.”

Just as the founders of Narragansett did over a century ago, Providence native Mark Hellendrung has chosen the road less traveled for his company. The founders made lager when other brewers were making ale, and Hellendrung went to the ground level in an age when many executives prefer to stay behind the curtain. He would not have chosen any other road to bring his company back to its old neighborhood.

BEN WOLKON B’13 considers beer a prescription drug.

occult 17

the college hill independent

LIVING LUNAR What Your Moon Sign Says About You

E

ver feel like your sign doesn’t quite fit you? When people read traits of your ‘scope to you, do you wonder how on earth you can be a Virgo who isn’t neat? A Gemini who hates to talk? A Sagittarius who hates to travel? Well, perhaps you’re not digging deep enough.

Your traditional sign is your sun sign. The sun sign is determined by birthdate. There are 12 signs, each with a different relationship to the sun at thirty-day intervals throughout the year. The sun sign generally acts as you can imagine: it represents your ego and your conscious life. However, astronomers can also calculate your moon sign.

Your moon sign governs, like the moon, your mercurial, emotional identity. It’s basically your unconscious and can tell you quite a bit about your intuition and attitudes in life.

To determine your moon sign, you must know your exact time and place of birth. Because the moon has 28-day cycles rather than year-long cycles, it has a rich and complex relationship to the time and place of your birth. To find your moon sign, go online to the Indy-approved: http://www.lunarium.co.uk/

Pisces Pisces moon! You are a sweet thing. You are the quintessential water sign, with the flexibility to go with the flow. However, you may be boastful in your ability to put yourself in others’ shoes. Your performance in the local community production of Othello will strike a weird chord with a couple of the audience members. Your thespian abilities will convince them that you actually are a manipulative villain. Watch your back for the townsfolks’ suspicious eyes.

Aries Aries—you’ve got some fire. Fiesty and prone to bouts of wild energy, you’re never a bore. You always take the party to the next level, for better or worse.

After a pleasant all-day drunk Spring Weekend, you’ll push forward and attempt to attend a very black-tie cocktail party afterwards. Remember to curtail your conceit, Aries, or else you’ll learn that taking your shirt off in the presence of bowties gets you a one way ticket to rehab.

Taurus Stubborn Taurus. Since your moon, rather than your sun, is in Taurus, you may hide your set-in-yourways nature. Underneath it all, emotionally and socially, you’ve got a method for everything. Somehow you’ve managed to convince some poor Political Science major to go to the GCB night after night on dates. Beware, though, because she’s not as patient as we are for your premature boringness.

You already have a job at Bain next year, so loosen up. Or else you’ll be Mitt Romney by next summer.

Gemini Gem, you are a fun one. Emotionally adaptive, communicative, and mercurial, you’re the sign that is the most in love with your friends. You’re completely in the present moment—but should probably remove yourself once in a while.

The intensity you bring to those around you is moving from endearing to weird. The boy in your chemistry class thinks you are flirting with him. On April 21, you will go to Boston and pick up a wild festish for cobblestones. Try to resist. It’s mostly your electric nervous energy that has you confusing infatuation with love—of architectural forms.

Cancer Dear Cancer. You sensitive, sensitive soul. Your feelings were badly hurt last week: your friend, who was writing a thesis in the form of the play, did not end up basing a character after you and your roommate’s zany lifestyle. I mean, come on.

However, you need to just create your own influence on your friends life or else you’ll end up bitter, going to Coffee Exchange when you’re 60 for a bit of social interaction. Seriously.

Leo You noble soul. You will find satisfaction in the mundane aspects of your life this week. Suggest a novel wrap at Geoff ’s, and find yourself flirting with Andrew, the 27-year-old working off his drug debt. You and he bond over Shedd’s Sauce, but once you find his large stash of whiskey, you realize it’s getting way too real. That’s kind of desperate. No worries—while you find your emotional sustenance in interactions with other people, this one doesn’t seem to affect you. On to the next one.

Libra Robotic to a fault, you always want to control everything in your world. Your need, emotionally, for a fair and just system of peace keep you from rocking the boat with your significant other. However, you need to take her to dinner more often. You’ve got a job next year in Silicon Valley, and we hear shit like that makes tons of $$$. Your stinginess with monetary and emotional volatility is silly: you will not get hurt very soon, so be free, Libz.

Virgo Virgo, we feel terrible. We haven’t given you a good horoscope yet. But we didn’t realize that even though you are obviously neat and a little uptight, you still leave your heart out on your sleeve. This month, invest in someone who appreciates that— vocally. The boy you wake up next to might not look familiar, but that’s just because the bore you’ve seen working at the Blue Room hasn’t always appeared as the sex tiger he truly is. Make him love you for you.

Scorpio You dramatic, dramatic soul.

The poem you write this week to your roommate (with whom you are in love) might freak him out. In the long run, you’ll still get tons of coffee with him. As an intense sign, you value the loyalty of the ones close to you. But you have to realize, some of us are just flaky. You are a lovely sign, and if you find the right person to go along with your thoughtful plans, you’ll have a nice end of April. Beware, however, the beginning of May—your professor will try to sleep with you once your thesis is graded.

Sagittarius Sag, not everyone wants to hear what you have to say about Buddhism. We’ve all heard it. However, your endearing earnestness about the Youtube videos you continue to show us will still win our hearts. Deep down, we’re meant for you, Sagittarius. Meet us in the foothills of Spain on June 13. We won’t be wearing anything except a loincloth made of canvas. XOXO Capricorn Cappy, we love you. Your final film project was amazing, and left us shaking to the core and sexually aroused.

Your intuition will steer you well in these next three weeks. Stay clear of dried fruit in all ways —literally and figuratively. Your solid ground and persistent emotional nature will serve you well in the future, so don’t worry about graduating: your loyalty and trust in friends will only multiply in effect. We always say: “Capricorns are old young and young old.” So, cheers.

Aquarius Aquarius, you have always wanted to be a painter.

That’s your emotional, intellectual side. But you have to realize that your emotional life may never match up to physical reality, and that’s both a problem and a virtue.

To combat this will be exhausting, but will be a lasting feature in your life. This will come to light in late May, when a building that you desperately love ends up being completely non-existent. It was all a dream. Despite the fact that Barnes and Hope never held your imagined gallery, you’ll fall in love with the world and your creative endeavors.

18 literary

13 april 2012

POTS AND PANS

by Urmila Chadayammuri Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

“B

oil half a cup of milk in a pan, add a quarter cup shredded coconut, three tablespoons semi-sweet chocolate chips and three scoops of chocolate whey powder.

Play around until the texture is akin to that in a sandbox the day after rain.”

A lot happens in these siliconated quadrangles Here epidermises peeled Turn souls twice shy.

Worms raced down now-cautious legs Cheered on in eager whispers Careful not to blow them off the geodesic From knee to unraveling shoelace When the latter isn’t too busy­— Its primary identity that of a sand-ladder, Much to the reproach of the industrious owners Whose urgent affairs are not to be impeded By imperfect locomotion.

For spacey invertebrates soon tire Vasya Who progresses on to black Dodges Four hundred twenty miles an hour Three hundred forty seven nights on the road And still alive, thank you very much.

Here Halim kissed Polya when they got married (The coolest kids in the infantile orchard Were destined to be together).

Alis religiously made a kulichik everyday Impeccable constructions And so she grew into an insurance specialist When Lyosha launched one too many offensives On the defenseless forts, Steady on his rabbit-path To teaching philosophy.

And me, I stored sensory input Perfectly suited for a recipe written fifteen years later.

A lot happens in those siliconated quadrangles.

LIST

FRIDAY 13–THURSDAY 19