Opinion Columns

Abel McDaniels | A Hollow Prize?: Rethinking Affirmative Action

This time last year, Penn (along with the rest of the higher education community) was anxiously awaiting the decision of a Supreme Court case that had the potential to seriously alter current admissions practices, Fischer v.

Frida Garza | Follow the (tech) jobs

New York City lore says: If you can  make it here, you can make it anywhere. Penn students have proven that we can make it in New York. Why don’t we want to go anywhere else?

Collin Boots | Hiding our history

If the ARCH building was flying the Rising Sun Flag by itself, I would probably advocate taking it down. Flying flags have always been a symbol of the present: who owns this ship, this fort, this hill, this public building. But when it’s a part of the walls, it’s a part of history. It becomes a symbol of the past and the meanings it had to the designer who put it there.

Diane Bayeux | In defense of a viral first kiss

Soko explained that while she wanted to kiss more, she also could not let go of the will to know her partner in the sense that once a connection is made, it is hard to let go of. This is one of the most beautiful things to take away from that video.

Collin Boots | Freedom from discrimination

Clearly we have decided as a society that, in principle, the Government has a compelling interest in disallowing certain religious observances when they counteract the public good.

Collin Boots | Freedom to discriminate

Religious freedom means you get to believe whatever you want. Religious freedom means you are free to practice your religion to the extent that it does not harm others.

William Zhang & Jason Choi | From the outside looking in

Because only when an issue no longer remains taboo, and when a community is willing to approach and accept the foreign and unfamiliar, can true dialogue and harmony exist.

Sara Schonfeld | Out of place at Penn

What do we have at Penn as a last hurrah? I guess it was supposed to be Feb Club, but these events have left me feeling like the estranged cousin at a family holiday.

Alexandra Friedman | The value of human life

What can be gleaned from this realization? There is a unique worth of human life in Israel unlike that of almost any other nation.

Roderick Cook | It’s not always about sex

When feminist spaces focus so heavily on intimate discussions of sex, they can very easily do a lot of harm to the same people for which they claim to be advocating.

Sara Schonfeld | Failing the Bechdel Test

For every female character, there are generally two male characters. Is it too much to ask that movies try a little bit harder to reflect reality? There are so many different types of diversity that Hollywood fails at.

Collin Boots | Robots don't kill people

Drones cannot be morally culpable for their actions. Using language attributing the actions of the operator to the machine needlessly distracts from the legitimate moral and legal concerns surrounding drone strikes.

Alexandra Friedman | Making a commitment to civic engagment

The idea of leaving the “ivory tower” of Penn often echoes throughout campus. It seems, however, not to have resonated with far too many students, who, like me as a freshman, rarely venture past 41st Street.

Jonathan Iwry | What is the human condition?

The things that fascinate me about the human condition, its most essential aspects, are so obvious and universal that you don’t need a class to discover them; you observe them just by living and seeing how others live.

Akshat Shekhar | The key to failure

We need to acknowledge that not only are these failures OK, but that they are inescapable for anyone trying to achieve on the daily basis what most students at Penn are.

Roderick Cook | Beyond "Born This Way"

We sometimes throw around this language with the best of intentions, but what are we really saying here? We are perpetuating the idea that queer and trans identities are things that we need to be OK with, but things that objectively are not good.

William Zhang and Jason Choi | Fitting in, branching out

In reflection, even seemingly inconsequential and superficial differences, such as the fact that the word “football” is somewhat of a misnomer in the United States (it should really be called something along the lines of “hand-egg”), that Americans don’t study “maths” (a red squiggly line just appeared under the word as I write)  or that the only affordable and edible Chinese food on campus  comes from food trucks (try Yue Kee), have a much greater psychological impact.

Frida Garza | Showing and not telling

If John Legend is really the right guy for [Commencement], I challenge the selection committee to share why they have picked him.

Alexandra Friedman | Redefining success

As long as our cultural definition of success requires that we identify “losers” among us, the ingredients for tragedy will be ever-present. When will we accept that we have already achieved success, just by being part of the Penn experience?

Jonathan Iwry | Reflections on the mortal coil

Michel de Montaigne once wrote that to philosophize is to learn how to die. That’s easy enough to say - as a philosophy major, I have spent many a term paper trying to solve some of the most intransigent questions ever asked.