Evidence suggests whitewashing of the composer’s legacy As probably very few of you outside the music department know, the Fargo-Moorhead area is currently in the throes of something called Beethovenfest. This is basically a community-wide celebration of Beethoven’s life and works. For those readers not very familiar with classical music, it’s pretty cool. Lovely, lovely…
I am reminded this week of the February 11, 2005 issue of The Concordian: the top headline is “STUDENT APATHY” (capitalized, I assume, for journalistic panache). The subject of the article is the fact that the Student Association – as student government was then called – had only one team running for executive office. The…
I made four new friends this week. At least, I think I did. I hope I did. I’d like to discuss that uncertainty. I was walking to my table in DS on Tuesday when I caught a group of strangers, twenty feet away, staring at me. They did the standard look-away as soon as I…
It may be old news, but “50 Shades of Grey,” with main characters Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Jamie Dornan) hits the big screen on February 12th — just a couple days before Valentine’s Day. The book itself was finished in 2011, with two sequels following in 2012. British author E.L. James originally self-published “50…
I was going to rant about girls. I’m not proud of it, but there we are. It was going to focus on girls I didn’t know, people I’ve met passing through the Atrium every Wednesday or sitting down to meals a few tables away, and the moments where they’ve met my gaze or haven’t. I…
The 2010’s are an exciting time to attend college. Since I enrolled at Concordia, armies of technocrats have forecast the demise of the American university. In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s fame and fortune, the “UnCollege” movement, which encourages young people to question the necessity of higher education, “create[d] a place where people who are…
I have a passion for the quantitative. I major in math. I serve on the board of a quantitative nonprofit initiative. I review metrics for another. I get inappropriately excited when I solve a tricky statistics problem or merge two disagreeable datasets. I digress, but you get the idea: I love numbers. Yet I am…
Someday I plan to take a tour of the United States to see how different people greet each other on the street . My only substantial experience is in the Midwest, where nearly everyone you meet on a sidewalk manages to look at you for a short moment, and to say hi if they’re especially…
Concordia likes to tout its various study abroad programs. In fact, it seems like if you don’t study abroad here, you may find yourself in the minority. You may see many of your friends posting pictures of their experiences abroad. And if you’re like me, you may even get envious sometimes because, after all, why…
A friend recently directed me to a Bloomberg Politics article called “Your Week in Gaffes, Déjà vu Edition,” which documents and proceeds to adeptly crack wise about two unfortunately similar Joe Biden gaffes that occurred two years apart. I didn’t initially plan to steal those gaffes for this column, but now I think I might…