I believe in a strong correlation between rules and the game of sweet or sour. If you have ever played the game — and with a mom who rolled around the carpool circles in a station wagon, I have played my fair share of sweet or sour — you know that in theory it’s very simple: wave equals sweet, ...
After having been long overlooked as an unavoidable part of playing contact sports, concussions have only recently started to get the attention they deserve. The rise in media coverage is partly a result of recent controversies in sports leagues such as the N.H.L. and the N.F.L, in which athletes have ...
Dear my fellow students: I encourage you to lay down your passions, lay down the issues you care about and learn to take no for an answer. I have seen all this “so-called activism” around campus, and yet it is clear that the administration is unwilling to change — accept it. The administration ...
The first op-ed I ever wrote for the Campus was titled “Keep Affolter.” Her anti-racist protest at last week’s affirmative action panel, however, “pushed [me] overboard.” I am “done beating around the bush.” It was a “destructive demonstration of [a professor] hijacking what could ...
Traveling in Australia and New Zealand, you quickly realize that people here are incredibly interested, informed and invested in the outcome of the American presidential election. The result matters to them on several levels. Mostly, of course, it’s symbolic; there was little daylight between the ...
Self-immolation may have become a somewhat grisly global phenomenon through the Arab spring, notably during the struggles in Tunisia, but recently it has tragically returned to where it has the most traditional associations: Tibet. Four Buddhists have set themselves alight in recent weeks in protest ...
[The following regards conversations on campus surrounding divestment, activism and diversity, which all directly relate to corporatization. It links newspaper reporting, silencing of oppressed voices and investing in unethical companies, while advocating for free and just existence on earth, an aim ...
Religious vocations used to be a big deal at this school. At the beginning of the 1800s, the majority of Middlebury graduates became ministers, who were required to read the Greeks and probably had to wash their own dinner dishes. I don’t blame us for forgetting these origins — we were a little ...
A good friend of mine told me about a conversation she had considering the dialogue present on campus, how people are always speaking about an issue, stringing eloquent sentences together and producing infallible logic that is birthed, lives and dies in the span of 15 minutes in the Proctor booths. ...
I made the switch to Vibram FiveFingers and minimalist running footwear after pulling a hamstring last spring, and since making the change, I’ve had the longest stretch of injury-free running I’ve ever had. It was a relatively mild hamstring pull — something not terribly uncommon in runners — ...
I left the U.S. this Thanksgiving break. France granted me access into their country sans glitch. I glided through their customs saying my bonjours, mercis and je suis americaines in all the right places, and so what if they lost my suitcase. Fast forward through some crepe consumption, oui-oui-ing ...
I am a Canamerican — one of the truest. Oh, and in the somewhat likely event that portmanteaus are not your bag, kind reader, allow me to elaborate: I am a dual citizen of Canada and America, and can’t for the life of me discern which country deserves my undivided national pride. Indeed, I’ve ...
As an enthusiastic blog-following liberal feminist, I welcome new theories that challenge traditional assumptions about men and women’s sexual “natures.” I’m naturally drawn to critiques of the stereotypical view that women seek meaningful relationships while men look only for sexual pleasure. ...
On Thursday, Nov. 15, Olav Ljosne, senior manager of international operations at Royal Dutch Shell, came to campus to speak on a variety of topics, including the future of energy demand and conflict surrounding oil. Both students and members of the faculty filled the Robert A. Jones ’59 (RAJ) Conference ...
A recent op-ed (“Divestment Creates Positive, Systemic Change”) argued that divestment is a valuable tool in the fight against global warming. While I wholeheartedly share in the author’s concern about climate change, I am not convinced that Middlebury College’s divestment from fossil fuel companies ...
This past week we kicked off the holiday season with Thanksgiving, which despite its most questionable history, has always been for me less about its origins and more an excuse to bring the family together to eat, drink and be merry. The holiday season itself, unfortunately, can be a divisive topic. ...
One of the College’s greatest strengths lies in its professors. The Princeton Review recently ranked the College seventh in the “professors get high marks” category, a fact that is likely unsurprising to many students here. What is surprising, however, is that a primary criticism that came from ...
After last Tuesday’s election, the media immediately began its post-presidential election process of savaging the losing campaign for reasons explaining their defeat. While it is true that Romney’s campaign could have made many small, yet beneficial changes to improve its positioning against President ...
For many students of the liberal arts elite, undergraduate existence is an era of unchecked decadence. You can eat a packet of peanut M&M’s and a cigarette for lunch and get nothing worse than a few judge-y looks from the girl headed towards the gym in Lululemon. You can saturate your bloodstream ...
Perhaps one of the most exciting results of last week’s election — for women, at least — is that the United States now has the highest number of women in Congress than ever before. Unfortunately, that only means 20 women in the Senate out of 100 seats, and 78 out of 435 seats in the House (although ...