Columns

Gaber ’23: How IATSE strikes reflect America’s normalization of work exploitation

Gao ’24: Art education is crucial for social and emotional learning. Stop cutting its funds.

This summer, the U.K. government announced a plan to cut 50% of its funding to art programs in higher education, impacting programs such as art and design, media studies, music and performing arts. The Former Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson claims that this decision leaves more funding ...

Gumus GS: The academic focus of PhD programs leaves graduates ill-equipped to enter the job market

If you are a PhD student, you have probably heard something along the lines of “this is a PhD, figure it out by yourself.” While PhD students enter their programs expecting to become highly independent researchers, we do not expect to graduate completely unprepared for the job market.  ...

Han ’23: The dangers of the ‘model minority’ myth

A recent poll conducted by the organization Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change asked respondents to provide adjectives to describe Asian Americans. The three ...

McGough ’23: Make elections matter again

Every two years, Americans gather at the polls to refresh the nation’s leaders. This biannual pace is perfectly normal to us, but it is astonishingly quick to our international peers. The parliaments of the United Kingdom, France and Canada default to five-year terms, while only two countries worldwide, ...

Fleischmann ’22: Democrats must learn from San Francisco and show that liberal policy can be both socially conscious and pragmatic.

By all accounts, San Francisco was a model of adherence to public health guidelines, and the board should have brought kids back to school far earlier. However, rather than focus their efforts on opening schools, Lopez, Collins and Moliga engaged in what might best be described as a careless investigation ...

McGrath ’24: The cult of Elizabeth Holmes

“First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then all of a sudden you change the world,” former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes told CNBC in a 2015 interview. Once touted by Forbes ...

Gaber ’23: Experiencing 9/11’s aftermath as an Egyptian-American

For months now, I’ve been dreading the coming of September, as I do every year. This year — an anniversary year — I knew would be much worse for me. I was newly one-year-old on Sept. 11, 2001. I don’t remember it. I don’t know where I was. I will never be psychologically affected by watching ...

Simon ’25: We’re failing our female artists

At the close of every summer, there seems to be a frantic, retrospective search for the music that defined the season. In honor of this tradition, I’d like to take a moment to draw attention to an album that, thus far, has been subject to insufficient analysis. Solar Power is New Zealand ...

Shanmugam '23: Parents, not poverty, are preventing many children in poor countries from getting educated.

Organizations such as the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development or UNICEF rightfully focus on inequalities at the country, province and village levels in their quest to improve lives. But inequality also stems from an even smaller economic agent: the household. For children ...

Han ’23: We cannot let our generation be defined by doom

In the wake of 9/11, Sandra E. Garcia, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote that after the terror attacks, she felt “as if a hole was torn in (her) reality and now anything was possible — even the unimaginable.” Sept. 11 was “the moment” that shaped the psyche of the preceding generation. ...

Gao ’24: Removing Confederate statues is not enough. We need to creatively engage with viewers to reinvent their meaning

Near my childhood home, there was a particular sculpture that I loved: It was a big, round, abstract sculpture carved out of black granite, depicting a seated mother raising her baby into the air. I remember blissfully running my hands over its smooth surface and feeling the gentle heat absorbed from ...

McGrath ’24: The “Why I Left Buzzfeed” phenomenon and the broken promise of for-profit activism

“Buzzfeed, at the end of the day, is a company,” former Buzzfeed Video Producer Steph Frosch told her audience in a 2016 YouTube video. “And just like any other company, they don’t always put moral values first. They put getting money first.”  Frosch is one of over a dozen ex-Buzzfeed employees ...

McGough ’23: America can fight for liberty abroad without militarism

The war in Afghanistan was one of America’s most expensive mistakes yet. Having cost a staggering $2.3 trillion  and the lives of over 5,000 Americans, the prolonged conflict accomplished none of its long-term goals, neither rooting out the Taliban and terrorist groups nor establishing a functioning ...

Simon ’25: A start to college more tentative than usual

The last night before I left home felt biblical. In the days leading up to my departure for my freshman year of college, my hometown was hit by the remnants of Hurricane Ida blowing up the East Coast. I remember winds and claps of thunder so loud they chased away sleep but felt dreamlike all the same. ...

Fleischmann ’22: The pandemic isolated us. Now, we can choose how to reconnect.

Most people, I expect, can feel the buzz around campus. Months after the first vaccines rolled out, the fog of COVID is finally lifting before the promise of a somewhat normal year. I moved into my apartment a few days ago and was shocked by what seemed like a universal willingness to socialize. Freshmen ...

McGrath ’24: All the web’s a stage: social performance and the rise of Internet slacktivism

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information,” Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, told the BBC in 2003. “The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron ...

Bayard ’24: Biden has redefined bipartisanship for the better

Joe Biden campaigned on bipartisanship, on “the spirit of being able to work with one another.” To be frank, that is hardly what we’ve gotten from his presidency thus far, one defined by partisan legislative maneuvering. Instead, Biden has redefined what “bipartisanship” means. For the Biden ...

Commencement 2021 | Sophie Culpepper '21: Losing spring, and finding home

This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. Before last March, I had never seen someone open a trash can with their elbows. For whatever reason, that is the detail I visualize when I recall my first impression of what would soon explode into the COVID-19 ...

Commencement 2021 | Wassa Bagayoko '21: In Deo Speramus, In God We Hope

This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. Hello, my fellow graduates, friends, families, and honored guests. My name is Wassa Bagayoko,  and it is my distinct honor and deep pleasure to address you this morning. I would like to start this address with ...