Opinions - The Brown Daily Herald

Opinions

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

By Will Fleischmann | September 23

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 ...

Opinions

McGrath ’24: The cult of Elizabeth Holmes

By Sarah McGrath | September 22

“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 ...

Opinions

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

By Yasmeen Gaber | September 22

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 ...

Opinions

Simon ’25: We’re failing our female artists

By Alissa Simon | September 22

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 ...

Opinions

Editors’ note: The Herald’s new website

By 131st Editorial Board | September 22

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 ...

Opinions

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

By Augustus Bayard | September 20

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 ...

STEM

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

By Selahaddin Gumus | September 17

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 ...

Opinions

Editorial: On loss and tradition

By Editorial Page Board | September 17

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. ...

Opinions

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

By Arjun Shanmugam | September 17

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 ...

Opinions

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

By Bliss Han | September 15

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. ...

Opinions

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

By Joyce Gao | September 15

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 ...

Opinions

Gupta ’22: IAPA and the old three-concentration system can and should coexist

By Deepak Gupta | September 13

“Do you pronounce it I-A-P-A or I-APA?” This conversation with my fellow International Relations concentrators was a lighthearted way of passing the time. But questioning IAPA’s pronunciation illustrated how the Watson Institute had transformed over the past year. In April 2019, the Watson Institute ...

Opinions

Marcus ’82: Three tips for 18-year-old me

By David L. Marcus | September 10

Driving on I-95 in the late summer, I feel something tugging me back to College Hill. As I stroll past University Hall, the Rock and the Ratty, I get wistful. Why didn’t I make the most of those undergrad years? What if I knew then what I know now?

Opinions

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

By Sarah McGrath | September 10

“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 ...

Opinions

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

By Jackson McGough | September 8

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 ...

Opinions

Dardashti: Rosh Hashanah’s promise tells us, ‘you’ve got this.’

By Rabbi Michelle Dardashti | September 8

Elijah is my favorite biblical prophet; he’s got fire and he’s got pain — like all of us. When his fears threaten to snuff out his fire, he runs away — like we sometimes do. God finds him hiding in a cave and, quite literally, calls him out (if you’ve got God hang-ups or anthropomorphism isn’t ...

Opinions

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

By Alissa Simon | September 8

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. ...

Opinions

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

By Will Fleischmann | September 8

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 ...

Opinions

Editors’ Note: This fall, The Herald will print three times a week and publish online daily

By 131st Editorial Board | September 2

After an unprecedented summer of publishing online daily during Brown’s first-ever summer term, The Herald will print three times a week this fall semester on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — up from the once-per-week frequency implemented in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will continue ...

Opinions

Palestine Solidarity Caucus: Brown can no longer be ‘progressive except for Palestine’

By Palestine Solidarity Caucus | August 3

On May 15, the Palestine Solidarity Caucus first shared Brown Community’s Letter of Solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, which condemns the May 2021 escalations in Israeli state and settler-mob violence against Palestinians across historic Palestine. In that period, Israel forcibly ...