Try searching Mississippi on Netflix. What are your results? “The Blind Side?” “The Help?” What else? Documentaries. Piles of them. Stacks. Towers. A hot trend in the world of the pop documentary is the tale of Mississippi Poverty. I type that with double capitalization because it refers not to Mississippi poverty, which surrounds us, saddens us and moves us to...
“So, what are you?” This is always one of the first questions asked when a member of the opposite sex decides to engage in conversation with me. There are so many answers, but I know only 11 of them will satisfy their query. Basically, what letters do you flaunt? Greek life is only approximately 38 percent of this school, yet somehow it always seems to be in the...
Each fall semester brings new blood and excitement, but throughout campus you can hear whispers. A freshman trash-talking “the uniform,” a grad school student rolling their eyes and denigrating leggings. I was one of them, too, three years ago. I was a too-cool, alternative, anti-mainstream wannabe who thought dyeing the ends of my hair made me punk rock (spoilers,...
In 2008, Costa Rica announced to a world drunk on oil that by 2021, 200 years since its independence from Spain, it would become the first country in the world to reach carbon neutrality. Carbon neutrality means the country would remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it put into it. In early 2015, Costa Rica made major steps in the direction of carbon neutrality....
A knowledgeable professor told my Pol 251 class with an arrogant certainty that Hillary Clinton would be the 45th President of the United States. His matter-of-factness nauseated my rightwing classmates, and it surely has droned in their ears for the past 12 months. Now the sprint towards November 2016 is underway. Following her 2008 shortfall, Clinton is well...
Few things get under my skin quite like the phrase “more than friends.” While culturally it’s become short hand for romantic involvement, it also reveals something that I find incredibly problematic: the systematic devaluing of friendships. I know that friendship has its place in our cultural understanding, but take a moment to consider the way romantic relationships...
In last week’s Republican presidential primary debate, an absolute gem was buried beneath about three hours of policy-thin and rhetoric-heavy discussion, and it came from consensus establishment front-runner Jeb Bush. In a spar with Donald Trump, Jeb Bush said, without the slightest hint of irony, that his brother’s administration “kept us safe,” without a challenge...
Donald Trump and Ben Carson both recently fielded questions regarding Muslims in America, and both gave grossly unsatisfying answers. A man at a Trump rally started with, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” and eventually asked Trump, “When can we get rid of them?” Instead of acknowledging that many Muslims are American and just as deserving...
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never had the urge to do something incredibly stupid when I’m drunk. Specifically, I’ve never had the urge to do something incredibly stupid that goes against my core values and beliefs when I’m drunk. In fact, I’m quite the docile inebriated college student when I drink, sitting quietly on a sofa, maybe with a book propped...
