In honor of my final contribution to the Campus, I wanted to mention some things I love about Middlebury. I love that everybody is on the same housing and meal plan. I love that we all have access to top-notch athletic facilities, to mental and physical health services, and to innumerable devices and ...
In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the calamitous threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime to the global order, we cannot lose sight of what an overreaction would do to America. If we allow Neo-Cold War ideology to drive American foreign policy and reshape our domestic economic and political ...
As I transition out of the Middlebury community, I will be joining a cohort of young people who face career uncertainty that I will refer to as “The Entitled Precariat.” Despite its allusion to Marxism, the Entitled Precariat has nothing to do with ideology. Rather, it is a group of young professionals ...
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 philanthropic sector in the U.S. is broken. According to Jeffery Sach’s estimate in his book, The End of Poverty, just $175 billion dollars annually over the next 20 years, appropriated efficiently, could end global extreme poverty, defined as people living on less than $1.25 a day. The estimate ...
Last week in my article “Empathizing with Mental Illness,” I made some serious errors that offended some readers. First, I want to apologize to those I offended and to the Middlebury Campus editorial staff. I accept responsibility for my submission. Even more importantly, however, I want to thank ...
Mental illness is not a personal shortcoming; it is a disease that is exacerbated by the shame that comes with stigma. We as a society gravely misunderstand mental illness. While we are universally willing to treat bacterial infections, mental illness is presumed to be a personal shortcoming rather ...
Cheating at a competitive place like Middlebury will never go away, but it is possible to change the incentives that currently allow its tolerance. Beyond being lazy and counter-productive to education, cheating is a collective action problem. The best way to prevent cheating — in addition to investing ...
A friend of mine once described “fun” as looking forward to an event and reminiscing about that event. Anticipation and nostalgia, he thought, were more important to explaining our experience of fun that the actual experience. Daniel Kahnman’s research, including his most recent book Thinking ...
1. Eating Beef is horrific for the environment. Eating beef results in an enormous amount of carbon emissions, to the tune of around 2.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide per 100 gram serving (or around 214 calories of 90 percent lean beef). In fact, a drive from Middlebury to New York City actually releases ...