09/08/09 9:02pm
Dear Class of 2013,
When I wrote my goodbye column for these pages in May, I said I would pay you all the Icelandic krona in the world to switch places
05/15/09 5:00am
A Series of Memos on the Occasion of our Graduation from Childhood.
In lieu of a column this week, I've decided to take a page from 34th Street and pen a few Shoutout-esque letters to express my feelings toward various people and/or inanimate objects (minus Robert Pattinson this time).
04/21/09 5:00am
Tomorrow is Earth Day, the celebration of all things nature (and a possible extension of yesterday's festivities for some). Though I'm not entirely certain of the difference between Earth Day and Arbor Day (something about deciduous?), Obama said the environment was important so I'm celebrating both this year.
04/07/09 5:00am
In a scene straight out of Alice in Wonderland, I went to a very merry unbirthday party last week. Several of us caroused around a table at an intimate BYO, celebrating, well, nothing. No one had a birthday. No one had an anniversary.
Instead, "My job offer just got rescinded!" someone declared, passing around the tomato and mozzarella salad.
03/24/09 5:00am
Scrolling through the Penn Registrar is a depressing task for this graduating senior. Knowing I won't be here next semester to take advantage of "Cinema of the Balkans" or Turkish I makes course examination a slowly sapping exercise, but I can't help torturing myself.
03/03/09 5:00am
It was 10:56 on a chilly Wednesday evening. Six of us hunched over the coffee table, waiting for the finale while I attempted a complicated recipe I had seen the week before. "Dammit! I never should have tried this!" My roommate peered up at me. "You're microwaving popcorn.
02/17/09 5:00am
It was busy last week on Capitol Hill and in Philadelphia. In one room on the Hill, the House Financial Services committee grilled eight banking chiefs on how they used their portions of the $700 billion bailout. Down the hall, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee vainly tried to get some answers from Stewart Parnell, the president of Peanut Corporation of America, the company responsible for shipping tainted peanut-based products across the country.
02/03/09 5:00am
We look forward to several traditions when February rolls around: the symmetrical nature of the month's four weeks*, the repeated airing of Groundhog Day, the repeated airing of Groundhog Day and for seniors, the start of Feb Club, a chance to socialize with the people whose phone numbers you have from NSO, but whom you never got around to calling (Sylvia, we sat on the bus together to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
01/20/09 5:00am
When Bernie Madoff was arrested on December 12, it was easy to dismiss him as another Wall Streeter getting his due. In the wake of massive bank and investment firm failures, we've become desensitized to the damage that's crippled our financial system. For liberal arts students especially, the fall of the titans has produced the sweet satisfaction that comes with choosing a life of Proust instead of Fuld.
11/25/08 5:00am
The European sustainability bash has been the global hot ticket for the past several years, but only recently have American cities begun to accept the invitation. San Francisco arrived early, a veritable organic presence with the foresight to ban plastic bags from large grocery stores in 2005.
11/11/08 5:00am
Over the past week, pundits have dubbed Obama's victory the result of a "digital election," one that utilized text messaging, e-mails and MySpace to get support from our generation. And while the strategy worked astoundingly, the information revolution leaves me a tad uncomfortable when it's applied to other areas.
10/28/08 5:00am
We've all seen the celebrity-ridden awareness campaign that's been recently circulating online. "Don't vote," Ashton Kutcher and Courtney Cox tell us gravely. "It's not like it's the most important election we've ever had." In case we didn't get the message, Penn Leads the Vote made its own version of the clip featuring campus bigwigs.
10/07/08 5:00am
Perhaps the two most important pieces of advice freshmen receive are to avoid dating people in their hall and to avoid citing Wikipedia in a paper for class.
While the first is questionable, the second makes sense most of the time. After all, when the Benjamin Franklin statue in front of College Hall was renamed the "Liora Pollick Statue" on Penn's Wikipedia page, no one noticed for two months.
10/06/08 5:00am
After sharing his tales of war-time reporting and primary-debate moderating, CNN host Anderson Cooper left Irvine Auditorium full of captivated students eager to learn more.
With the same mission in mind, The Daily Pennsylvanian sat down with Cooper for a few minutes to discuss reporting, politics and his lack of culinary skills.
09/23/08 5:00am
'Kevin is an American. He is in Moscow now. Repeat after me."
As the class joyfully chorused back to Ludmila Vladimirovna, our Elementary Russian professor, I couldn't help but contrast the experience to my time in Spanish 140 during freshman year.
That class, which followed Alessandro and Pablo on their journey through el siglo de oro, had 25 students in it.
09/09/08 5:00am
The federal government is in trouble. No, not for the usual litany of reasons concerning diplomatic blunders abroad, lack of unilateral credibility or a skyrocketing deficit. This time, it's about Boomsday - the looming retirement of thousands of baby boomers from the government.
07/24/08 5:00am
As the Bush administration steps down, America's youth must take responsibility and lower carbon emissions before it's too late
05/02/08 5:00am
When Irshad Manji gets up in the morning, she checks her e-mail for death threats and forwards them to the police. It's a regular day for Manji, who has become a target for religious extremists after publishing her international best seller, The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith.
09/24/07 5:00am
Columbia University's decision to host Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on its campus today before his visit to the United Nations has provoked heated discussion among students and political pundits alike.
One Facebook group called for students to welcome Ahmadinejad to America so as to better understand his views; presidential candidate Sen.
12/12/06 5:00am
For students at Cornell University, keeping in touch with Mom and Dad is becoming a whole lot easier.
