Federal Architecture and First Amendment Limits

In December of 2020, President Trump issued an executive order on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” a draft of which was leaked to the press in February under the title, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The order provided for updating the Guiding Principles of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence Program to promote the use of “classical and traditional architectural styles,” which “have proven their ability to inspire…respect for our system of self-government.” According to the order, there would have been a presumption against the use of such modern architectural styles as Brutalism and Deconstructivism in the construction of new federal public buildings, as these styles, according to Trump, fail to convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of America’s system of self-government.” The order was troubling in that it proposed an official style that would have amounted to a censorship regime. Had it not been quickly rescinded by President Biden, the order would have deprived many architects and other interested parties of their First Amendment rights. One can also imagine a follow-up order calling for all new federal buildings—which belong to the public—to be decorated in twenty-four karat gold leaf and marble. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question of whether architecture can be considered a form of constitutionally protected “speech.” However, as an expressive art, architecture should without question be among the forms protected by the First Amendment. In this article, I explore the First Amendment implications of Trump’s proposed order, the limits on the public’s ability to use the First Amendment to contest offensive government speech, and the ways in which existing law fails to reckon with the unique limitations and possibilities of architecture

Asking for It: Gendered Dimensions of Surveillance Capitalism

Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable. Liberal feminists argued that in the context of reproductive rights, advertising and privacy belonged on the same team. A woman’s right to self-determination in the realm of reproduction, constitutionally protected by the right to privacy, would be undercut by any restriction of advertising related to reproductive products and services, they argued. Liberal feminists fought for the right to be targeted by advertising, which they said contained valuable information. This strategy, I argue, invited the vampire of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” in. By the 1980s, companies were bombarding new mothers with coupons, ads, and baby formula samples before they had even left the maternity ward. Photography companies paid for access to maternity wards, where photographers would snap photos of newborns, then ask new mothers who might still be heavily medicated for their credit card information in exchange for prints. Disney started sending its salespeople into hospital rooms. Today, women faced with the far more formidable threats posed by Big Data lack a meaningful cultural or legal context for pushing back, and they are suffering as a result. Many neoliberal feminists still think more representative or more inclusive advertising is worth fighting for. I argue that we yet have much to learn from the radical feminists who believed that we have a privacy right to be free from the intrusions of advertising altogether. For feminists to limit themselves to fighting for an equal right to be exploited by asymmetries of information would be to replicate the tactical errors of previous generations of women who believed that targeted advertising would be crucial to their liberation. To resist capitalism today means pushing back against the idea that privacy is obsolete and insisting that algorithmic intelligence and consciousness are not continuous

The Impact of Stress on Diet, Sleep, and Exercise Amongst College Students

Stress is something that everyone faces in their lifetime and has an everlasting impact on their health. College students face high levels of stress throughout the semester, but how is that impacting their behavior? I conducted a survey alongside Dr. Melanson, a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, to see just how college students are reacting to stress. The survey was circulated to different departments and classes to achieve a widespread collection of data. The survey remained completely anonymous and posed questions about eating, exercise, and sleep habits, along with questions on demographics and stress levels. Our goal was to gain insight on how college students react to stress and engage in various habits that can be impacted by stress. The results of the survey showed an increase in the consumption of unhealthy snacks, a decrease in the consumption of fruits and vegetables, and an increase in food intake. In addition, we found that college students get less sleep and are sleeping worse due to stress. There was also an overall decrease in the amount of exercise per week students get when they are stressed compared to when they are not stressed. Stress can have long term effects and these behaviors can impact their health later on in their lives. Stress alone can put people at a higher risk for chronic diseases, but the unhealthy eating habits, the lack of sleep, and the decrease in weekly exercise can also increase the risk of chronic diseases. The behaviors of students during stressful times can impact their lives in 20 years, so it is important to be mindful of the unhealthy habits one is engaging in. By conducting this survey and understanding how college students are reacting to stress, we are able to gain insight on the behaviors that will impact the rest of their lives. We can take the information gained from this study and help students understand why maintaining healthy habits when they are stressed will decrease their chances of chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes in their futures. The actions of today may not be seen until 20 years from now and it is crucial to be mindful of that

Towards a Dramaturgical Theory of Constitutional Interpretation

Like legal texts, dramatic texts have a public function and public responsibilities not shared by texts written to be appreciated in solitude. For this reason, the interpretation of dramatic texts offers a variety of useful templates for the interpretation of legal texts. In this Article, I elaborate on Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson’s neglected account of law as performance. I begin with Balkin and Levinson’s observation that both legal and dramatic interpreters are charged with persuading audiences that their readings of texts are “authoritative,” analyzing the relationship between legal and theatrical authority and tradition. I then offer my own theory of constitutional interpretation organized around realizing the potential of the text. I test this theory against provisions of the U.S. Constitution written at varying levels of abstraction, using dramaturgical analogies to identify an appropriate interpretive framework for each type of provision. In doing so, I discover parts of the Constitution where merely applying the text “as written” in an originalist sense would be impossible. I argue that a dramaturgical approach to constitutional interpretation has advantages over previously proposed literary criticism-inflected approaches because dramaturgy answers to the demands of the present where these other approaches mainly look backward

Waste

"If at its most elemental, the theater is an art form of human bodies in space, what becomes of the theater as suicide capitalism pushes our world into a posthuman age? Waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater traces the twentieth-century theater’s movement from dramaturgies of efficiency to dramaturgies of waste, beginning with the observation that the most salient feature of the human is her ability to be ashamed of herself, to experience herself as excess, the waster and the waste of the world. By examining theatrical representations of capitalism, war, climate change, and the permanent refugee crisis, Waste traces the ways in which these human-driven events signal a tendency toward prodigality that terminates with self-destruction. Defying its promise of abundance for all, capitalism poisons all relationships with competition and fear. The desire to dominate in war is revealed to be the desire to obliterate the self in collective conflagration. The refugee crisis raises the urgent question of our responsibility to the other, but the climate crisis renders the question of anthropocentric obligations moot. Waste proposes that the theater is the form best suited to confronting the human’s perverse relationship to its finitude. Everything about the theater is suffused with existential shame, with an acute awareness of its provisionality. Unlike the dominant narrative of the human, which is bound up with a fantasy of infinite growth, the theater is not deluded about its nature, origins, and destiny. At its best, the theater gathers artist and audience in one space to die together for a little while, to consciously waste, and not spend, their time.

Information Technology, Social Networking, and Controlling Behaviors Among Adolescent Girls Involved in Dating Violence

Hypothesis: Girls with dating violence (DV) histories will report high levels of involvement in social networking and information technology (SNIT) as well as frequent engagement in controlling behaviors via SNIT

Driver Rehabilitation in Parkinson’s Disease Using a Driving Simulator: A Pilot Study

Parkinson’s disease (PD) impairs driving performance. In this pilot study, four drivers with PD (selected based on poor road driving performance in the past) participated in a rehabilitation program using a driving simulator. Two different training drives (#1- multiple intersections of varying visibility and traffic load, where an incurring vehicle posed a crash risk, #2- various scenarios on decision making, hazard perception and response) were administered in each session (total 3 sessions once every 1-2 weeks) with immediate feedback after the drives. We observed reduction in crashes in drive #1 and improved scores on drive #2 in the simulator. In addition, 3 subjects showed marked improvements in their total error counts on a standard road test between baseline and post-training sessions, one subject stayed stable. These findings suggest that our simulator training program is feasible and potentially useful in impaired drivers with PD

Lower-Resolution Retrieval of Scenes in Older Adults With Subjective Cognitive Decline

Objective Scenes with more perceptual detail can help detect subtle memory deficits more than scenes with less detail. Here, we investigated whether older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) show less brain activation and more memory deficits to scenes with more (vs. scenes with less) perceptual detail compared to controls (CON). Method In 37 healthy older adults (SCD: 16), we measured blood oxygenation level-dependent-functional magnetic resonance imaging during encoding and behavioral performance during retrieval. Results During encoding, higher activation to scenes with more (vs. less) perceptual detail in the parahippocampal place area predicted better memory performance in SCD and CON. During retrieval, superior performance for new scenes with more (vs. less) perceptual detail was significantly more pronounced in CON than in SCD. Conclusions Together, these results suggest a present, but attenuated benefit from perceptual detail for memory retrieval in SCD. Memory complaints in SCD might, thus, refer to a decreased availability of perceptual detail of previously encoded stimuli

Subjective cognitive decline predicts lower cingulo-opercular network functional connectivity in individuals with lower neurite density in the forceps minor

Cognitive complaints of attention/concentration problems are highly frequent in older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD). Functional connectivity in the cingulo-opercular network (CON-FC) supports cognitive control, tonic alertness, and visual processing speed. Thus, those complaints in SCD may reflect a decrease in CON-FC. Frontal white-matter tracts such as the forceps minor exhibit age- and SCD-related alterations and, therefore, might influence the CON-FC decrease in SCD. Here, we aimed to determine whether SCD predicts an impairment in CON-FC and whether neurite density in the forceps minor modulates that effect. To do so, we integrated cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of multimodal data in a latent growth curve modeling approach. Sixty-nine healthy older adults (13 males; 68.33 ± 7.95 years old) underwent resting-state functional and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging, and the degree of SCD was assessed at baseline with the memory functioning questionnaire (greater score indicating more SCD). Forty-nine of the participants were further enrolled in two follow-ups, each about 18 months apart. Baseline SCD did not predict CON-FC after three years or its rate of change (p-values > 0.092). Notably, however, the forceps minor neurite density did modulate the relation between SCD and CON-FC (intercept; b = 0.21, 95% confidence interval, CI, [0.03, 0.39], p = 0.021), so that SCD predicted a greater CON-FC decrease in older adults with relatively lower neurite density in the forceps minor. The neurite density of the forceps minor, in turn, negatively correlated with age. These results suggest that CON-FC alterations in SCD are dependent upon the forceps minor neurite density. Accordingly, these results imply modifiable age-related factors that could help delay or mitigate both age and SCD-related effects on brain connectivity