In 2019, during his campaign for president, University alumnus John Hickenlooper ’74, MA ’80, addressed the California Democratic Party’s convention. Hickenlooper used his speech to decry key pillars of the progressive agenda, such as the Green New Deal. In response, the crowd showered him with boos. Although Hickenlooper’s speech wasn’t a surprise—he’d positioned himself as a moderate during the […]
Somehow, I’ve ended up in the exact same place, the exact same spot even, that I was this time last year. I’m sitting on my aged, leather sofa, catching up on poorly made British soap operas, drinking hot mint tea with honey, and planning a summer that I hope COVID-19 will allow. By no means […]
I arrived on campus for the start of this academic year as a walking contradiction: When I first walked into my High Rise, I had both zero expectations for the upcoming school year and a laundry list of wishes, anxieties, and unresolved goals from the anticlimactic end of my sophomore year. I was hoping, given […]
Over a year ago, “Zoom” was nothing more than a 1970s kids’ show or a word we’d occasionally use to indicate we were in a hurry. But in March of 2020, the word—or rather the teleconferencing platform to which it refers—quickly gained popularity. As the pandemic intensified and working from home became the new norm, […]
I laughed when I saw Joe Biden’s speech on CNN, when he addressed the recent rise of anti-Asian hate crimes within the United States in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although I appreciated the condemnation, I found his comments regarding the “un-American” nature of hate crimes hilariously out of touch. There’s nothing “un-American” about anti-Asian racism. […]
“So what are you going to do, man?” It was July. I was standing in a neighbor’s garden, talking on the phone to my friend Ryan through my headphones. We had both recently graduated from Friends’ Central, a Quaker private school outside Philadelphia. Two weeks prior, I had received my graduation cap and gown in […]
CW: Mention of transphobic arguments and transphobic video. When you hear the term “manufactured outrage,” it calls forth an image of a media outlet or a talking head vomiting out some overblown garbage, mother-birding it to the masses for consumption. The consumption of the outrage is a turning inward, into the viewer, the watcher, the […]
This Scholarly Personal Narrative operates under the idea that individual liberation, guided by the growth of a critical consciousness, can lead to a larger scale, collective liberation from the social structures and societal norms human beings impose on ourselves. In modernity, we have seen the prioritization of rational thought, a tendency that invalidates spirituality in much of […]
You know those mornings when you wake up early and know that the day is going to be productive? That’s exactly how I felt before getting the call from Dr. Tom McLarney that I had tested positive for COVID-19. That feeling quickly turned into shock and then confusion as I prepared myself to move into […]
Before I met my boyfriend last year, I had close to no knowledge of Reddit. The social news aggregator (a mixture of a discussion platform and link distributor) was something that I was aware of but had never quite understood. I was part of the minority—there are more than 430 million monthly active Reddit users […]