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Thursday, Feb 12, 2026

Opinion


The Setonian

A Drought in Confidence

This past Sunday, a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Global Warming? Not Always” made the claim that “the scientific evidence does not support an argument that human-induced climate change has played any appreciable role in the current California drought.” To support his argument, NOAA ...


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Hunting: It Doesn’t Get Any More Local Than This

I don’t know how many months I spent at Middlebury before more than just a few people knew that I hunted.  It wasn’t that I was expecting a negative response to my hobby — it was just that no one on campus ever talked about hunting.  No one discussed their plans to head to the woods for the ...


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The Meet and Greet: How Facebook Changed the Game

Whether it was in the panini line at Proctor, in the midst of conquering a snow mound, or inaudibly over the loud base of Atwater, I have tried to approach every new face with an open mind and faith that the kind act will be reciprocated. Like blinking, introducing yourself to new people is a natural ...


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SAT Optional: The Correct Answer

With pricey tutors who teach you to game the system and a strong correlation between income  and higher scores (average score rises with every $20,000 of additional family income), the SAT is flawed, and its prestige is falling as the ACT and other options rise in popularity. This week, the College ...


The Setonian

How to be a Flake

I’m sorry, I totally spaced out can you say that again?  Something about your dying pet?  Someone is having a birthday party?  I wasn’t listening.  What do you think the back of my head looks like to that boy by the soda machine? I don’t think I can make it, but have fun!  Why?  Well.  ...


The Setonian

Things We Won’t Tolerate

Last week, our fellow editor Edward O’Brien ’17 wrote an interesting Notes from the Desk calling out a group of straight Middlebury guys who verbally berated men who tried to dance with them at a Q&A (Queers and Allies) party, telling them to “fuck off.” We were talking about that situation ...


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Jared Leto and the Thought Police

Within minutes of Jared Leto taking the stage to accept the award for Best Supporting Actor at this year’s Oscars, there was a predictable, yet no less inane, post on my newsfeed in protest of his win. It was a link to an article titled, “10 Actors Who Could Have Played Jared Leto’s Role in ‘Dallas ...


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Choose Your Words Carefully

We need to change the way we interact with each other. Words are disconnected from speech, and the subsequent loss of emotion, rationality, and intent that comes with them has harmed all of our relationships. But everyone has heard the prophecies of the end of all meaningful interaction, how society ...


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The Mid-Midd Crisis

I had the unique opportunity of speaking at The Moth this past Thursday (the Moth, for those of you who don’t know, is a live story telling event held in the Gamut Room). The experience proved to be extraordinarily fun and exciting, yet I realized something as I stood up there recounting my tale. ...


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Why I Was Arrested This Weekend

What do you want to do when you graduate? Although I only have a year left, that question is quickly joining the list of things strangers ask you when you’ve just met them and they have nothing left to say. The answer is that I have no idea. When I think about how much I have changed every year since ...


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An Easy Win for Athletics

You cannot use the word “faggot” and not mean it offensively. You cannot say “no homo” around your friends and say it doesn’t matter because none of you are gay. You cannot claim that because “some of your best friends are gay,” that you are an ally. Last Tuesday, Queers & Allies and ...


The Setonian

Bring AAL into a Globalized World

On February 12th, Max Kagan ’14 wrote an op-ed in The Campus entitled “Just Call AAL Other” in response to a recent student-led campaign that seeks to modify the current Cultures and Civilizations requirement. The current system requires students to take one class with a large focus on each of ...


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An Inconvenient Truth About Carbon Neutrality

Last week, the Campus updated us on Middlebury’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2016.  The degree of precision found in this initiative is incredible. To cite but one example, Middlebury collects data on where each and every woodchip burned in our biomass plant is harvested and milled. This seems ...


The Setonian

Methods of Environmentalism

The discipline of political science has come quite a long way since Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the classic work in the study of politics, which asked and answered questions about our nature as political animals. Whereas Aristotle’s methods in that book were primarily observational and logical, ...


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Hangin’ Tough

If I were to try to describe it, I would root my answer in dichotomies: overwhelming yet exhilarating, unknown yet expected, intimidating yet motivating, and most importantly fearful yet rewarding. No, I am not talking about skydiving or meeting Will Ferrell, but rather the trials and tribulations, ...


The Setonian

Who Run the World? Google.

Google’s effectively unparalleled capacity for high-level innovation may prove to be the source of many of the technological innovations that will define human advancement in the 21st century. Inherent in the spectacular potential of companies like Google to reshape society, however, is the profound ...


The Setonian

It’s a White Woman’s World After All

A sea of blonde and brunette ponytails filled the social space for a discussion on body image disorders and ideals for women led by Courtney Martin, author of “Perfect Girl.” She argued that a dire consequence of college women pursuing the image of “the perfect girl” is the self-hate of the ...


The Setonian

Middlebury-U?

In the fall of senior year at my high school, the question people were constantly asking each other was not ‘where are you applying ED?’ but rather ‘to which Ivy are you applying ED?’ Given this attitude of my classmates, I hope that none of you will judge me on the following dilemma I faced. I ...


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In Defense of EUR

I did not plan to write for the Campus this semester. I am studying abroad and had hoped to spare the Middlebury community my whining and myself the dangerously inflated ego that being published in the Campus might cause. And, frankly, I was looking to get away. Alas, many things are easier said than ...


The Setonian

Tolerance: More Than a Number of Beers

You don’t control where you came from or how you were born. You don’t have control whether you were born with privilege any more than you can control whether you were born without it. The one thing you do have absolute control over is your actions. I don’t want anyone to think that I am blaming ...




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