I first encountered the work of Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a wide-eyed freshman in high school. My inchoate intellectual views were just starting to take shape, and I had developed a keen interest (nay, an obsession) with political philosophy ...
Correction appended.
Once again, Spring Weekend has come and gone, along with its large, drunken concerts. I cannot blame concert-goers for their inebriation. I certainly would not want to listen to such decrepit music without numbing my higher functions first. Music on campus, along with the wider world, has made a long, ...
In their recent columns, Simon Liebling '12 and Ethan Tobias '12 debated the comparison of the contemporary struggle against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the struggle for divestment from the apartheid state of South Africa in the 1980s ("The right side of history" and "No ...
May 2, 2010, will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Herzl — the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl's desire for Jewish self-determination in Judaism's ancestral homeland came to fruition on May 14, 1948, an uncanny fulfillment of a fifty-year prediction he had made in 1897. ...
I had the fortunate experience last Friday to sit in the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center, manning a lonely stall for the A Day on College Hill Activities Fair with nothing to occupy me but a can of diet soda and a pending sense of doom for an upcoming thesis proposal deadline. Many pre-frosh, too shy ...
We write with humility at the challenge placed before Catholic students at Brown University. Though it may not be obvious to the general University population, Catholicism plays a large role in the lives of hundreds of students on campus. Each week, over two hundred people gather in the upper ...
You know the dichotomies: east meets west, communism versus capitalism, classical goes contemporary, etc. Throughout the span of modern European political and cultural clash, the tension between these sets of ideas has bred conflagrant rebellion and uproarious revolution, new beginnings and salient ...
Recently I attended a lecture by photographer Fazal Sheikh, a MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient, during the opening of his exhibition "Blessed Daughters." Mr. Sheikh began by showing the audience photographs of Sudanese refugees in Kenya. He went through a dozen or so pictures of gatherings of refugees ...
In the wake of any disaster, both victims and bystanders find themselves haunted by difficult questions. The recent child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is one such disaster. With such a widespread range of harm and a confounding reaction from the Vatican, the scandal has sparked many tricky discussions.Initial ...
The National Census Day passed quietly on Brown campus on April 1, 2010. In fact, many of us didn't receive the census form in our mailboxes until the second week of April, while average American households received the forms in early March. The American Constitution stipulates that all residents of ...
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, don't call it a chicken. Yet this is exactly what those who constructed a makeshift wall on the Main Green last week were doing. The wall stood as a protest to both "Apartheid in the Occupied Territories" of Israel/Palestine and the U.S.-Mexico border ...
I worry that often lost in the familiar heroic histories of grassroots political movements is the reality that today's moral consensus on the justice of their causes belies just how unthinkably controversial these movements were back when they were actually being waged. The unanimous agreement that ...
It is time to shelve the New Curriculum, at least for a while. Today I passed an impassioned tour guide who longingly, lovingly, yearningly explained the benefits of the New Curriculum. He pleaded that each Brown student wants to be here, that we're not just here because we want to fulfill some ...
The U.S. Armed Forces and the Rhode Island Blood Center, a Food and Drug Administration-regulated bank, both have policies in place that exclude people on the basis of sexual orientation. According to the 1993 "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" memo, "The military will discharge members who engage in homosexual ...
I recently found out that we go to the 20th-most-stressful college in the country.
As the days warm and our outer layers are secreted into closets and left for next November's chill, it becomes daily more difficult to summon up the sort of righteous indignation that informed past columns. Something about a sunny 70 degrees makes one aware that poring over closely typed editorial pages ...
These are the days of panic and desperation, of poring over floor plans searching for the secret spot no one has found before. It's Housing Lottery season, that magical time when freshmen simultaneously pray they don't get waitlisted and jealously plot the downfall of the groups ahead of them that have ...
The Roman Catholic Church has recently suffered from another round of revelations regarding clerical rapists and institutional cover-ups. Notably, evidence has surfaced of Pope Benedict XVI's role in the protection of these priests while head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Some people ...
Many viewpoints have been expressed in recent weeks regarding Brown's proposed 4.5 percent tuition hike for the next academic year. In this regard, Simon Liebling's '12 column denouncing the increase as plutocratic excess ("Grin and bear it," Mar. 25) stands as a beacon of clarity and reason in stark ...
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