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 ...
Sixty thousand people are dead in Syria. That number is three times the capacity of our football stadium, substantially more than the number of American soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam and higher than the number of deaths in all of the other Arab Spring countries combined. Yet I have not seen ...
I have a confession to make. My parents are paying for every cent of my college education: $220,000 or more over four years. I am supremely in their debt. Sadly, I have no concept of what it truly represents. You could call me spoiled or ungrateful — and I admit sometimes I am both of those. In this ...
If the intervention in the West African country of Mali shows us anything, it’s that colonialism is still alive and well, though its form has changed somewhat. Its old colonial ruler, France, has directly intervened in Mali in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” claiming that if they do not, ...
Googling “religion anti-intellectual” returns about 3.6 million hits, most of them on the anti-religion side of the argument. In fact, the only article on the first page countering the assertion that religion is inherently anti-intellectual is from The Gospel Coalition, which, though a fine site, ...
In Kevin Carty’s ’15 recent column (“Identity politics is counter-productive,” Feb. 7), he argues that dismissing a person’s opinion as the product of privilege is detrimental. His argument consists of three claims. First, dismissing the opinion doesn’t win the argument. Second, it discourages ...
How do we work together? That seems to me to be the question for this new year. We’ve certainly spent more than enough time learning how to disagree. Just ask the United States Congress how much they know about that. I’ve learned a lot from them about disagreement and not working with others. U.S. ...
Spending last semester abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland, I experienced cultural differences that shaped me emotionally and spiritually, providing me a worldview the likes of which anyone who hasn’t been abroad (i.e., you) could never understand. On this mystical journey, I immersed myself in culture, ...
Fuerbacher '14: Yes College dorms now come in many flavors: cultural, affinity-based, religious and even gender-neutral. Given the plethora of organizations and campus life options one may access in college, it is logical to offer substance-free housing to students who do not wish to be surrounded ...
If I could make one suggestion to President Christina Paxson on her strategic planning update, it would be to implement a Brown/Johnson and Wales culinary dual degree program. Though I have a feeling this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, we still have an impressive variety of food here on College ...
A few months ago on Facebook, a friend of mine wrote of how one friend’s perspective “as a white male in a fraternity” seemed to guide his opinion about sexual assault policies at Brown. A couple days later, I saw one writer’s opinion explained away by another’s accusation that he was simply ...
When Bill Gates puts a huge chunk of his fortune into the American educational system, a few things happen: Schools receive funding they desperately need, educational policy is fundamentally corrupted, Bill Gates receives extensive attention and praise and Bill Gates’ lifestyle stays exactly the same. That ...
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