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. ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021’s Commencement. I did not first move into Brown during a pandemic, but I might as well have. As most of us have found ourselves during the past 14 months, in that moment in September 2017, taking my very first steps on College ...
Standing on the threshold of graduation, the path ahead seems rife with uncertainty. In our years at Brown, we’ve spent our time building ourselves into a community that supports, challenges and encourages us. That’s a hard thing to let go of as we leave College Hill behind. Four years ago, I ...
When I got into Brown, I was sitting criss-cross on my high school’s hallway floor, next to my best friend. I’d stepped away from the classroom with her to check my admission status. When I opened the page and saw I’d gotten in, my shellshocked scream was almost as much about my excitement to ...
This piece was originally submitted as a speech for the Class of 2021's Commencement. Welcome, fellow graduates, parents, faculty, friends and alumni, and the person here because they thought this was a free vaccine line. I see you. As a member of the Band — yeah, those sickos who wake you up ...
In high school, I once joked that I didn’t find out I was Black until my first day of sixth grade. That is, of course, an exaggeration; my parents and my parents’ parents are Black, and I have never dissociated myself from my identity. The kernel of truth at the core of my joke was that my Blackness, ...
The age-old adage states that college is where you find yourself and your people. At 18, I wished fervently to “find myself” falling in love with math, championing the resolution of some low-level environmental issue, graduating with straight A’s in my STEM and humanities courses alike, striking ...
When I first arrived on Brown’s campus the day of first-year move-in, I wasn’t all that different from any of my peers chaotically flooding the University gates. Like many of those around me, there was a large pit in the bottom of my stomach, which lodged itself there to remind me of my fear that ...
Over the past two years, identity politics have trickled into the curricula of university settings worldwide. At face value, such movements appear well-intentioned. Expanding avenues of learning beyond the Western canon is an extremely important and necessary means to better appreciate and engage ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has been defined by one ultimate feeling: loneliness. Whether through isolation, quarantining or social distancing, public health over the last year has depended on minimizing contact with others as much as possible to slow the spread of the virus. These circumstances have had ...
On March 16, 2021, after a year in which the United States saw anti-Asian hate crimes rise nearly 150 percent, a white gunman murdered six Asian women in three Asian-owned spas after allegedly saying that he would “kill all Asians.” Just two days later, the United States and China entered dangerous ...
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