Opinion Columns
Hayley Brooks & Ali Kokot | Working to play
Penn has a pre-professional aura that radiates outward from Huntsman, enveloping the rest of campus. This internal pressure, coupled with the external pressure from career-minded parents, can discourage students from seeking other opportunities, even if those opportunities might be a better fit than finance. There should be more support for students who want to spend their summer incorporating their play — or better put, their passions — into their work.
Rachel del Valle | Updating the status quo
Today, instead of shifting education to match the new century, people point to the status quo as an argument to preserve it. But to suggest, for example, that there is a dearth of qualified minority candidates for administrative positions at Penn is evidence itself that the system is broken.
Divya Ramesh | Dropping names
We all find it awkward when we mix up names, but it seems I’m the only person upset over rechristening Sam as Wesley and mistaking Mary Kate for Caroline.Anthony Liveris | The fall of the American empire
We are only $550 billion away from reversing Tytler’s Cycle. More so, this is over a 10-year period. That makes it $55 billion a year in a $13 trillion economy.
Kurt Mitman | There won't be blood
The lifetime ban on males that have had any sexual contact with another male (MSM) since 1977 seemed a little extreme to me.
Nadine Zylberberg | A movie kind of love
Maybe Valentine’s Day is a little bit like the rom-com itself. It’s trendy to hate, it’s a commercial institution for suckers like you and me and its celebration is slowly fading out.
Hayley Brooks & Ali Kokot | The debased base system
However it happened, the baseball model has infiltrated both our collective consciousness and our corresponding bedroom behavior.
Rachel del Valle | Impressions of being young
Defining yourself against something — “I don’t like chick flicks” — can be easier than finding something you do like. The only problem is that you often end up living up to those categorizations.
Lauren Agresti | Eight dates a week
Roughly 2.7 mojitos into the evening, one member of our little party whipped out her phone with a wry smile and passed it around the table. She was messaging a boy on a dating app, and we were all reviewing their exchange.
Xavier Flory | The forgotten art
Concert violinist and Juilliard and Yale graduate Igor Pikayzen told me in an interview that pop is more about “creating a sort of ambiance” than producing worthwhile art. Indeed, blasting “Ass ass ass” is a crude but clear message to girls at frat parties. However, nothing great was ever conceived as background music.
Divya Ramesh | Experimenting with Experimetrix
I enjoyed participating in Experimetrix speech labs and word rating exercises that introduced to me to fields like psycholinguistics and visual studies. A friend of mine learned a fake language for a linguistics study and came back saying that it was “awesome.”
Jeff Nadel | Gratitude for guns
Due to the presence and prevalence of firearms, reason can now, to a much larger extent, determine our outcomes because generally, brute physical domination is no longer institutionalized as a method of problem-solving.
Kurt Mitman | Guess who should come to dinner
Since high school, college and graduate school graduation rates are lower for minorities than for whites in the United States, by the time you get to the top, there will be a much larger disparity in representation than in the population in general.
Morgan Jones | Name that identity
Pairing an identity with a name is not a new phenomenon, but now researchers have the data to recognize and support name trends with statistical analysis. So thanks for raising me, Mom and Dad, but you did most of the heavy lifting just by slapping a name on that birth certificate.
Adam Silver | The NFL is … socialist
Among professional sports, the NFL is unique — a look at the different financial structures of other sports leagues makes the NFL’s socialist tendency even more apparent. Although Americans call European soccer a socialist sport, it is far more capitalist than our beloved NFL.Editorial | Hired?
The fact that USC is willing to hire Lynch less than a year after the controversy shows a willingness to overlook Lynch’s actions. While this does not amount to condoning what Lynch has done, we feel it is akin to saying it’s acceptable. This disregard for ethical standards represents an inherent breakdown in the system.Arielle Pardes | There’s an app for that
The newest thing in the world of sex technology is Bang With Friends. The app — which has already gathered over 250,000 users since it launched last week — notifies pairs of Facebook friends who have identified that they’d like to “bang.”
Hayley Brooks & Ali Kokot | Forward thinking
While we’ve all been warned against sending pictures of ourselves in the buff, what’s more worrisome is that we don’t seem the least bit concerned about forwarding, sharing and further exploiting our peers. Worse, this trend is not bounded by the cybersphere — it’s alive in real time.