The U.S. Supreme Court has a number of high-profile environmental cases on deck for this term. As Greenwire reports, the Court can choose to hear cases that concern challenges from independent parties and 17 states calling for a broad review of the Environmental Protection Agengy’s (EPA) greenhouse ...
Trigger Warning: References to sexual assault. It’s the green issue – hip hip hooray! For so long have we waited for this very day! A day to discuss the power of Green! ‘Cause Green runs our school, you know what we mean? It takes Green money to keep this place sterile and clean – We should ...
To the Middlebury Community, On Friday midday, we, the undersigned, will gather outside of Old Chapel to greet the Middlebury College Board of Trustees as it prepares to make decisions about Middlebury’s future. We will be holding “Student Office Hours” as members of the Divest Middlebury campaign. ...
This past July I was at a festival in Geneva, Switzerland waiting for Best Coast to come on stage when I realized that I was actually seeing Beach House and not the aforementioned surf-pop duo. When I told people which bands would be playing at the festival I would say, “Neil Young, Santana, Phoenix, ...
“What did you do over your Febmester?” I looked around the room full of new acquaintances. One had traveled to Africa. Another had ridden on horseback across part of Patagonia. A third had trekked through Nepal. How could I match that? I’d simply enrolled in another college for the fall semester. ...
We owe much of what we enjoy here to the decisions and guidance of the Board of Trustees. But considering how much this group impacts us every day, how well do we really understand the board? While some student groups engage directly with the trustees through positions like the Student Liaison to ...
Without looking, what underwear are you wearing today? Are you certain? I believe that we are prone to overestimating how often we are right. By acknowledging the likelihood that we are wrong, we can protect ourselves from this irrational tendency. As a thought experiment, consider if you were randomly ...
“Government shutdowns [are] an unpleasant but integral part of the legislative-executive power struggle ... built into the American Constitution,” former Republican Speaker-of-the-House Newt Gingrich wrote in a recent blog post. Gingrich knows this firsthand, having negotiated with President Clinton ...
So what do we think of “insert great author of literature” and their work, “insert great work of literature?” Crickets chirp. Chairs creak. A class of Middlebury students looks down at their books. The professor waits…and waits…and waits. A brave student raises their hand. The tension is ...
Editors’ Note: The following text contains vulgarity. As both members of and allies to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer community at Middlebury, we are appalled by the homophobic letter that was written and taped on a student’s door two weeks ago. The letter included the phrases: ...
I write to us all from Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. For the past three years, a coalition of First Nations people, French Acadians and Anglophones have been working together to keep Southwestern Energy Company (SWN), a hydraulic fracturing company, from polluting the water and land ...
Middlebury College prides itself as a well-established language institution that offers students with a wide array of high quality language courses. We have languages such as Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. But can we really call ourselves a high quality language institution when we don’t offer classes ...
Middlebury’s latest effort to become more bike friendly and safe includes the addition of “sharrows” stenciled on downtown streets to remind motorists that they “share the road” with cyclists when there are no or inadequate shoulders or bike lanes. Motorists should remember that cyclists ...
Middlebury College likes to drink. Not all of us, certainly, but it is no secret that the collective BAC of this campus rises substantially when Friday night rolls around. We are not unique in this regard – drinking is an endemic part of college culture nationwide. But in the interest of community ...
Somehow, without any U.S. troops being deployed or thousands of civilians dying as collateral damage, both Iran and Syria seem to have given in to international diplomatic pressure. Iran’s new regime, after being democratically elected to succeed that of the highly questionable Ahmadinejad, has lived ...
As someone whose academic interests lie primarily in the humanities and social sciences, I would hardly identify as someone who “does science.” However, I am also someone interested in the environment, specifically the ways our ideas about our environment fit in with the ideas we have about pretty ...
The other day, a classmate asked me, “so is Washington State, like, crazy now that weed is legal?” Although I joked that Seattle seemed more overcast than normal, truthfully, little has changed since Washington voters passed Initiative 502 last November. That’s not to say that marijuana consumption ...
How do we use the skills and opportunities we have to make the world a better place? Middlebury students revisit this question time and time again, from conversations in the dining hall to the “Careers for the Common Good” blog from the EIA. Hudson Cavanaugh ’14 has explored this question over ...
We often discuss the need for more community engagement as a student body. We’ve devoted barrels of ink and hours of our time to panels, papers, and symposia. Yet all of that leaves us with little more than a general agreement that something needs to be done differently. We would like to suggest a ...
We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in class, and someone in front of you is watching the soccer game on his computer or browsing New York Times headlines. Despite your best efforts to focus on the professor, you find your eyes drift as you wonder about the New Jersey Senate race or why Paul Krugman ...