At first glance, it might seem inappropriate that the motto of an institution such as Brown would be "In God We Hope." The God of our Baptist forbearers has had very little to do with our experience of the last four years. However, I believe that "In Deo Speramus" expresses something more relevant than ...
Recently I attended a lecture by photographer Fazal Sheikh, a MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient, during the opening of his exhibition "Blessed Daughters." Mr. Sheikh began by showing the audience photographs of Sudanese refugees in Kenya. He went through a dozen or so pictures of gatherings of refugees ...
The opposite of discrimination isn't indiscriminateness. In our quest to create an inclusive, pluralistic society, we have abandoned the standards and expectations that give us a vision of how to conduct oneself properly. This isn't an inevitability. I firmly believe that there is a way to hold one ...
A few days ago, Providence native and New York Times opinionator Stanley Fish penned the most mind-bogglingly stupid opinion column I have ever read ("Are There Secular Reasons?", Feb. 22). In fact, this column was so stupid that Professor Fish managed to edge out Miss Teen South Carolina for "stupidest ...
Enough is enough. I was up late trying in vain to write a paper recently about the passing of the literary visionary J.D. Salinger, so I ventured to the OMAC in hopes of going for a run to get the creative juices flowing. As they say: might makes write. But after braving the cold Providence night, I ...
As I read the heart-wrenching accounts of people being pulled from the rubble in Port-au-Prince, I couldn't help but wonder what we hope to do for Haiti in the long term. Eventually the streets will be cleared of rubble and the wounds will start to heal. But what comes next?
Publish or perish. This is the mantra of the aspiring professor in the American university system. If the only purpose of universities was research, this wouldn't be a problem. "Publish or perish" is merely a narrower version of the more comprehensive mantra of the American economy: do your job, or ...
There are two types of people in politics: those who accept the burden of freedom and those who cling to the comfort of their own delusions. Contemporary American politics and culture has been a feeding-frenzy for the desperate fury of weak (not stupid) people who would rather believe in absurdities ...
So in case you pizza-eating, Mac-using, lecture-going bourgeois rabble haven't heard, there is this really funny blog/book called "Stuff White People Like." The premise of it is that if some clever guy in horn-rimmed glasses can describe things you like as being cliche, then you aren't a unique snowflake ...
A caution to us future leaders of America: the recent financial meltdown and resulting misery was caused by very smart people who were very bad at thinking about what they were doing. It takes a mathematical genius to come up with the convoluted equations for pricing derivatives and mortgage-backed ...
Solutions by The State News
