Being naive is easy. Being cynical is easy. The trouble, the test of real engagement with the rest of the world, lies somewhere in between. By naivete, I mean that instinctual, overcredulous belief that others are almost always well-intentioned. When one of your moderate, optimistic friends cannot ...
A few weeks ago, “His Airness” and “Sir Charles” reached new milestones in their careers. Michael Jordan proved he was still the best Michael on his own underachieving team, while Charles Barkley finally got his total cholesterol under 300. Oh, and they also both turned 50. “But with advances ...
Enriquez '16: Yes As a kid, I always wondered why I was so lucky and felt guilty — to have toys, to have parents who weren’t divorced, to live in a quiet and safe neighborhood — and to this day I have never learned why I have been blessed with all these things. The guilt would nag at me for weeks. So ...
In a recent Herald opinion column (“Fuerbacher ’14: Room and board: You don’t get what you pay for,” Feb. 20), Elizabeth Fuerbacher ’14 questions the necessity of forcing students to live in dorms and pay for Brown dining. Specifically, she calls dorms and dining plans “overpriced propaganda ...
Did you know the federal budget hurricane, known as the sequester, is set to land on college students tomorrow? Federal student aid will be cut by 6 percent. What does 6 percent mean? According to the Student Aid Alliance, if Congress does not act by its March 1 deadline — to avert a disaster it ...
Graduating from college is part and parcel of the American dream. Holding a college degree has been a major advantage for graduates for decades. In 1980, average tuition at a four-year institution was $8,756, adjusted for inflation. Then, only about a quarter of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college. ...
Our generation has both the collective attention span and the curiosity of a caffeinated squirrel. Though many students have the intellectual curiosity to explore beyond the syllabi of their courseloads, many lack the focus span or extrinsic incentives to move far beyond the surface level of multiple ...
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to get married. I didn’t want to get married when I was straight, and the prospect of having to pay for two bridal dresses has done precious little for my enthusiasm. Now that Rhode Island is inching toward “legalizing love,” and committed activists for whom ...
There’s been a lot this year written about athletics at Brown — why they benefit or don’t benefit the University, what athletes represent, issues about laundry. Before anyone gets upset, what I say applies not only to athletes here, but also to other community members who relish in demanding athletic ...
It’s been a long time coming, but the decades-long “war on marijuana” appears to finally be winding down. In November, voters in Colorado and Washington passed initiatives to allow for the establishment of legal, state-regulated industries for recreational marijuana and hemp. When asked how the ...
“They peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her… They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl. They raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team… It isn’t really rape because you don’t know if she wanted to or not.” These are perhaps the ...
Gianotti ’13: Yes Once upon a time in the hazy realms of myth-history, all of mankind spoke one language and, migrating together, resolved to build a city. God saw their progress and was all like uh-oh, “They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they ...
Every election cycle, millions of Americans representing a diverse cross section of the nation turn out to cast their ballots. The concept of voting is entrenched in western civilization, and while it might be easy to blindly engage in a tradition with cultural roots dating back more than two millennia, ...
A pink ribbon. An inspirational YouTube video. A group of women dancing. What do these things have in common? While they are symbols of important movements, they are also symbols of a dangerous trend in activism: “slacktivism.” Slacktivism, as the name suggests, involves supporting a cause on an ...
Kevin Carty’s ’15 recent article in The Herald (“Brown and its hidden conservatism,” Jan. 25) makes the provocative claim that Brown is secretly much more conservative than one might think. One of Carty’s main points is that most Brown students, despite growing up in a two-parent household ...
We have all heard the expression “you get what you pay for.” Around the United States, hundreds of thousands of students like us are paying nearly $60,000 to attend private colleges. Slightly over two-thirds of that sum can be attributed to core academic purposes, namely tuition and textbooks. According ...
Lattanzi-Silveus '14: Yes I’m not going to argue that you in particular should not take a job in the financial industry. Nor am I going to judge those who do. The banks are one of the few places hiring — in fact they are eagerly recruiting — and many of us do need to pay off student loans or ...
Taking basketball from a childhood passion to AAU stardom to D-I dreams to a career is a journey very few ever complete. Almost everything has to go right — you essentially need to take the best qualities from Jude Law and Ethan Hawke’s characters in “Gattaca” — perfect genetics and unrelenting ...
It’s an agonizing decision. To friend? Or not to friend? Facebook is the new flirting frontier, and the decision to make the move to solidify a virtual friendship is a crucial first step in establishing communication with your crush. It shouldn’t be. Nowadays it seems we spend more time clicking ...
What if there was a way to get all of your textbooks for free? How much would you save? $500? $600? $700, even? Try googling “torrent” and the name of your textbook. I am talking about BitTorrent networks: online tools that enable users to stream material from many different sources at once. These ...
Solutions by The State News
