Before I begin I want to point out that I have no affiliation with Dining Services, financial or political. (This is why I have not officially endorsed Susan’s bid for the U.S. presidency.) The only power DS holds over me is dictating which flavor of coffee I’ll drink each day. Thus, it is with total…
Imagine, if you will, a perfect student. This precocious individual spends all of his or her free time studying, has impeccable attendance, and always scores highly on tests. Now, visualize said student logging on to the internet to check grades and being devastated to find that, for the first time in the individual’s life, he…
After a few hectic weeks, we are headlong into the semester, and I am thinking about masks. No, not Halloween masks, but instead the masks we wear in an attempt to fit in. Orientation whipped by, then before we knew it Family Weekend and thereafter Homecoming flooded media with exciting pictures and so-called Happy Cobber…
During my time as a Cobber, I have allowed most changes made to furniture arrangements and eating implements in Anderson Commons to pass me by with little comment. Perhaps I grumbled at first when they began to replace the angular black bowls with the round white bowls last year, and perhaps I was momentarily confused…
Many of my fellow feminists are extremely indignant about all dress codes, arguing that they are objectifying and that compliance to them often requires a lot more of women than men. But I haven’t always had a bone to pick with dress codes. I went to a Catholic school that demanded my wardrobe consist of…
Do you like McDonald’s french fries? Do you like the Offutt School of Business? Do you like Minnesota farmers? I hope you answered yes to at least one of those questions. Though the scope of those three things seems pretty broad, there is a significant correlation between them that should be noticed. So, if you…
As the token outspoken feminist in many of the classes and groups I’ve been a part of, I’ve been asked about trigger warnings a lot. A “Trigger Warning,” for those that do not know, is a disclaimer at the beginning of a video or piece of literature designed to prevent unaware encountering of subjects that…
One way to approach environmental activism is by utilizing systems thinking. Systems thinking is “the art and science of making reliable inferences about behavior by developing an increasingly deep understanding of underlying structure,” according to Barry Richmond, a late systems scientist for High Performance Systems, Inc., an IT Technology Solutions Provider. When one considers the…
To be honest I only watched half of last week’s Republican debate. And the only reason I watched any of it at all was to write a piece about it, since this column is about politics, and since that debate is what’s going on in politics right now. I want this column to be about…
With this column I’d like to look at different parts of our political system and examine how each has contributed or is contributing to the strange and disillusioning state of US politics in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Cards on the table: I hate our country’s politics with a fervor so great it turns…