Vol. 35 Issue 8
Nov 10, 2017
From the Editors
This time last year, we here at the Indy spent a frantic production day assembling a newspaper we’d never prepared to publish. Our one consolation, on the Wednesday after Election Day, was turning to our role models writing for newspapers and magazines on the left—to see how they were handling the newly visible crisis, negotiating a reluctance to believe it was true alongside a responsibility to report on it truthfully.
Astoundingly many of these outlets are gone now. Last week, we learned that Gothamist was shut down by its billionaire owner, Joe Ricketts, after its staff voted to unionize. In the past few months, the Village Voice and Teen Vogue have shuttered their print editions; the Los Angeles Times was briefly banned from Disney’s advanced screenings this week after publishing an investigative piece about Disney’s contentious relationship with the city of Anaheim; MTV News, in its so-called “pivot to video,” fired nearly its entire staff.
We know: journalism as we know it is undergoing a long slow death. We know: the current administration sows a dangerous distrust of news media, and relies on a tangling of fact and fiction that’s central to its platform. But that knowledge doesn’t mean we’re not terrified to see these trends coincide. We’re hoping from the ashes of print media a sustainable model for local reporting rises, and we’re hoping that we can stay in print in the meantime.
– WT, LB, & SKArts
My Cromwell
On the fantasies of Wolf Hall
I’d seen the book around the house, collapsed on different surfaces. I had heard remnants of kingly names and dark adjectives …
Vision Machines
Apocalypse & virtual deterrence in Southland Tales
content warning: suicide The world never quite ends in Southland Tales. When a nuclear detonation interrupts an idyllic suburban afternoon in …
Ephemera
Features
Greater Welfare
Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan and the contemporary debate over Universal Basic Incomes
Since the Great Recession, proposals for a radical transformation of the American welfare state have appeared in think-tank proposals and newspapers …
A Constructed Divide
Puerto Rican migrants and the future of a people
There are few things more difficult to talk about, even fewer to be hopeful about, than the future of my island. …
Literary
Embody
I spend the first week of May writing about bodies. I sit at library desks for two hours at a time …
Metro
Criminal Treatment
Rhode Island’s efforts to treat opioid-use disorders in its prison population
Michael is set to leave the prison in two days, ending an 80 day sentence for possession of a controlled substance. …
Call Against Arms
A new RI law restricts gun ownership for domestic abusers
content warning: suicide, murder, infanticide In 2013, a Providence woman, fearing for her life, applied for a final protective order against …
News
Week in Unresolved Cases
Iditaroids The walls of my boyhood room, once decorated with Sports Illustrated Kids centerfolds of Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, …
The Politics of Fragmentation
Mobilizing for secularism in sectarian Lebanon
On November 4, Saad Hariri resigned as Prime Minister of Lebanon, shocking the country. “I sensed what’s being woven in secret …
Occult
Outcomes
I am thinking of you every day. I love you. Do you remember when we planted a red gumball in the …