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- Havdalah #47: WE'RE BACK (and better than ever)
Havdalah #47: WE'RE BACK (and better than ever)
9 Av, 5785 / August 2, 2025
White Rose RI
August 02, 2025
Happy August, everyone,
Welcome back, and thank you for bearing with us as we took our little summer break last month.
I think it is this time of the year when I most appreciate living in Rhode Island. I can drive 50 minutes and get to one of the most gorgeous coastlines in the world. I can step out my door and go for a run on a bayside bike path. Del’s Lemonade. It almost makes paying Providence rents bearable.
We’re back this week with some good news about bills that were signed by the governor in July and a Sidebar from Katherine about Too Much News.
We’ve also got some changes. We’re going to switch to a weekly format, so that there isn’t so much time between newsletters while trying to keep track of what’s happening. As part of that, we’re only going to have Sidebar once a month so that you (and we) aren’t buried under a mass of writing every Saturday. The Rhode Island legislative session is out for the year, so that’ll be on the back burner, but we’ll let you know if anything interesting happens before the 2026 session!
And also, we’re always happy to get more people involved, so if you’re interested, let us know!
So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu…
Jackie (she/her)
PS: We’d like to hear from you! Let us know how we’re doing!
Workers and Renters: Providence General Assembly
When: Saturday, August 9, 12:00pm and every other Saturday
Where: 134 Mathewson Street, Providence, RI 02903
From their Instagram:
Worried about Trump?
Want to defend our communities?
Want a world that works for everyone?
Come to the Providence General Assembly!
Spanish, ASL interpretation and childcare available upon email request
Masking requested and masks will be provided
Direct questions to [email protected]
Butler Hospital Workers on Strike - Join the Picket Line!
When: Everyday, 6:00am-7:00pm
Where: 345 Blackstone Boulevard, 02906
On May 15th, hundreds of hospital workers, represented by SEIU 1199NE, went on strike at Butler Hospital. Butler Hospital is RI’s only dedicated psychiatric hospital, and the workers are striking over understaffing, unsafe working conditions, and poverty wages.
As of writing (8/2), the staff are still on strike, with Butler having subsequently canceled their health insurance, and the police and city targeting the strikers with noise complaints.
The strikers can use our support! Donate supplies, send a supportive message, or join them on the picket line!
Linktree with information on strike background and how to support it
ACLU Rights Explainers
When: Up now
Where: Online
The ACLU just released two updated versions of their explainers about your rights when interacting with immigration agents (ICE) or the police. They have them available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Haitian Creole, French, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, and Khmer.
Read and save this material – regardless of your own immigration status – and send to friends and family! Click the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page to download PDFs that you can print, plus the ACLU posted on all their social media platforms (@riaclu) if you want to save and share online.
If you have a specific way to distribute larger numbers of the paper copies, please email the RI ACLU at [email protected] or call them at 401-831-7171. They have a limited supply printed, but will provide as many as they are able.
TEK Walks Kayak Event with Chrystal Mars Baker
When: Friday, August 15, 1:00pm-4:00pm (Rain Date August 16)
Where: WPWA, 203 Arcadia Road, Hope Valley, RI 02832
In this kayaking event, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) will be shared as people row to various spots along the Pawcatuck River.
During the TEK Walks, Indigenous educators will impart Traditional Ecological Knowledge as we explore the ancestral lands of the Narragansett Nation.
As you may have heard, Congress recently allowed Trump to claw back $9 billion in funds, which included $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). This cuts all federal support for NPR, PBS, and their member stations. This includes Rhode Island’s NPR affiliate, The Public’s Radio. If you can, give them some support, as local reporting is incredibly important (and now, almost entirely supported by Viewers Like You).
Employee Rights Bill
Bill Number: S0126 Sub A
Summary: S0126 Sub A protects employees’ free speech regarding matters of politics, assembly and religion, as well as attendance at employer-sponsored meetings regarding political or religious matters. Employees aggrieved by discipline or discharge by the employer would have the right to bring a civil action against the employer seeking appropriate relief including reinstatement, back pay, and attorneys' fees and costs.
Our Position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: Signed into law by the governor on July 2nd
The Freedom to Read Act
Bill Number: H5726 Sub A / S0238 Sub B
Summary: H5726 Sub A and S0238 Sub B promote free expression and access of information by prohibiting the censorship of library materials and amend current laws to clarify the range of materials considered “indecent” and “obscene” for the purposes of criminalizing the distribution of materials containing sexual content.
Our Position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status:
H5726 Sub A and S0238 Sub B were both signed into law by the governor on July 2nd
Note: As these are substitute bills, the Bill Lookup Page doesn’t seem to be showing them properly; some creativity in googling may be required in finding info on them.
Criminal Justice Reform Bill
Bill Number: S0278 Sub A
Summary: S0278 Sub A provides immunity from arrest and prosecution for prostitution, procurement of sexual conduct for a fee, loitering for prostitution, and soliciting from motor vehicles for indecent purposes, under particular circumstances including physical restraint, threat of violence or legal action, intimidation, or confiscation of immigration or governmental identification documents.
Our Position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: Signed into law by the governor on July 2nd
Tenants’ Rights Bill
Bill Number: S0274
Summary: S0274 prohibits a landlord from inquiring about the immigration status of a tenant, subject to any federal laws or regulations.
Our Position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: Signed into law by the governor on July 2nd
Katherine (she / her)
I listen to a lot of news. Specifically, I listen to a lot of news podcasts.
NPR, Al Jazeera, Slate, Cool Zone Media, and more. I can keep up with it, more or less, because I work a job where most days, most of the time, I can have headphones in, and because I listen to most podcasts at double time.
(In fact, the joys of an open plan office means that the headphones are somewhat necessary.)
I’ve been on vacation for a week, however, visiting a friend. And since I’ve been out of the office, going on hikes, talking over which TOS film we think is the best (I believe we settled on Search for Spock), I came back on Sunday to a queue in my podcast player that was well over 100 episodes long, probably half of which was news. Since then I’ve been running through a week’s worth of news as fast as possible, and it got me thinking of the diminishing returns of compulsive — how to put it? Information consumption? Knowing?
The problems of ignorance are obvious — a person who doesn’t want to follow the news, or doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t have the time, is an uninformed voter and an uninformed person. It makes someone easier to manipulate because it means not knowing how issues affect each other, unfold over time, or reflect policies and problems from decades before. It means being at the mercy of, at best, second or third hand information, gotten in snippets from overheard conversations, social media, or a person’s working-in-the-dark instincts. Politicians lie, and so do statistics, and understanding how and why and when that is happening and when something isn’t so much a lie as a simplification, misdirection, or an honest acknowledgement that a question doesn’t make sense is incredibly important for making decisions and for understanding other people’s choices.
However, the reverse situation has problems as well. I hesitate to call it problems of knowledge, because I don’t think that’s what they are. Say instead the problems of Needing To Be Informed. Because — at least for me — the problems come not from knowing too much about any given topic or issue or news alert, but from the compulsiveness. The endless stream of news, unrelentingly anxiety inducing and varying levels of fatalistic, a firehose of information that prevents the actual retention and incorporation of knowledge, which takes time and thus cannot be done for the wide swath of news available to everyone everyday. A stressful waterfall of alerts so unending and exhausting that they reduce the energy available for actually acting on that information.
And both produce guilt; but weirdly, the same guilt. Guilt over not knowing more, of being uninformed, of sloth, of laziness, of indifference. A hounding of time unplugged with the guilt that I could still be forcing information into my mind, a poisoning of joy by the knowledge that others suffer (a tech age update of the “children are starving in Africa, so finish your dinner!”).
And so I add another podcast. Another substack. Vow to go back to reading The Guardian every day. But that isn’t a costless decision. There is only so much time in the day; only so much energy in a day. And at a certain point the return on each added source of information isn’t just diminishing, it’s negative. The relentless bombardment turns me exhausted, indifferent, fatalistic. None of that additional information helps with what I actually want to be doing, which is helping people. Protesting. Calling my senators. Checking in on my friends. Volunteering at a soup kitchen. Doing things, not just anxiously and compulsively spending spoons on ingesting more and more news.
I don’t know what the perfect balance is, and what that balance is for me is going to be different for you. But I need to find that spot; or at least get a lot closer. And I bet so do a lot of you. Need to find the point where I’m informed about what’s happening in the world and (ideally) how to address it, without being drowned in information about what I can’t change and can’t help. I don’t know what that point is going to look like, and I suspect that point isn’t always going to be the same, but I know that right now it means I really shouldn’t add that new news podcast to my feed, and probably you shouldn’t either.
(Oh hey, looks like The Public’s Radio finally fixed The Weekly Catch’s RSS feed…)
Needle Drop: “Hurry Hurry”, Air Traffic Controller
Pod Recs: It Could Happen Here
Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #27 (It Could Happen Here, August 1, 2025)
