Opinions

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

Simon ’25: More than charity — it’s time to reenvision refugee aid

It’s a crisis, but also an inflection point. Rhode Island isn’t just inheriting the consequences of American interventionism; it’s now met with an opportunity to set an example by centering those receiving aid rather than those giving it.

McGrath ’24: The ‘cancel culture’ debate reimagined: envisioning restorative justice in the online discourse

Last month, historian and Staff Writer at The Atlantic Anne Applebaum laid down a searing indictment of so-called cancel culture — a phenomenon that she has deemed “The New Puritanism.” ...

Editorial: We shouldn’t have to live in Wellness to live well

The Wellness Center dorm certainly sets a promising tone for future expansions of University housing, and its mission of promoting well-being is admirable. At the same time, the building’s almost luxurious design highlights existing inequities in the Brown residential experience, setting a worrying ...

Editorial: Hungry for change

With students once again flooding into the Ratty, clamoring for sandwiches at the Blue Room and foraging for a late-night snack at Jo’s, Brown dining is back — but for many, it is not back to where it needs to be.

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.  ...

Letter: How we choose Brown’s public art

When public art stirs up controversial discussions, that is a good thing — it doesn’t do its job if everyone walks by without giving it a second look.

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 ...

Editorial: How can we identify with public art we don’t understand?

One of the values of public art on campus, according to Brown, is that it “contributes to a sense of place, and inspires identification with this institution, its history and its values.” But the “Large Concretised Monument ...

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, ...

Kharel: America must globalize vaccine distribution

Though recent promises to increase global vaccination distribution point in the right direction, a big question remains: Why are we allowing waste of these life-saving vaccines daily and why has our global response been so delayed?

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 ...

Editors’ note: The Herald’s new website

The Herald is excited to launch a newly redesigned website today. In an era when the bulk of news is consumed online, and in our first website rework since 2015, we sought to update our site’s design and enhance reader engagement by increasing its accessibility and building in more space for innovative ...

Bayard ’24: The GOP’s heart is no longer orderly nor conservative

In his 1968 book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” novelist-slash-journalist Norman Mailer offered the following characterization of the rank-and-file Nixon supporters he saw at that year’s Republican National Convention in Miami: A “principal of a small town high school, local lawyer, retired ...

Gumus GS: When PhD dreams turn into nightmares: bad mentoring edition

Nightmares surrounding STEM PhDs are plentiful — classic examples are the student who spends 14 hours a day in the lab, the coworker who sabotages others’ experiments and the newly graduated student who stares down the barrel of two consecutive postdoctoral positions because they are unprepared ...

Editorial: On loss and tradition

Vartan Gregorian Quad has been called “New Dorm” by Brown students since the days when it was actually new. But over the past year, as an incoming class of students entered onto a mostly empty campus, a new name for the residence hall emerged: “Greg.” This change, while amusing, was also alarming. ...