Opinion

BARAN | Alcoholic Framework

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“Ever heard of beer, bro?”

American drinking culture, especially male drinking culture, is seriously flawed. No matter what anyone may say, there is an implicit pressure on young adults to consider drinking a fun pastime with no serious consequences. The explicit pressure is largely nonexistent, but the status quo, especially in Greek life, encourages drinking. Our worldview is to see drinking as innocuous. If someone chooses to abstain from alcohol, that choice is accepted — but usually with reluctance and without in-depth consideration of the reasons behind their abstinence.

Opinion

BARAN | Flip to a Flip-Phone, the Rerun

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We all hate ourselves just a little bit every time we look at the Screen Time app on our smartphones. Every day we tend to underestimate the time we spent on our phones. Then we see the hours jump out at us from our screens, and think: “Where did all that time go?” Yet, save a select few, we continue to squander large parts of our day on our phones. Why don’t we stop this madness? Last year I wrote a column about my mom doing something drastic in response to this screen problem.

Opinion

BARAN | College Shouldn’t Be a Breeze

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“Follow your passions.” “Do what you’re interested in.” This is advice we receive too often as college students. It’s also generally ignored. I’ve met many students, including myself, who take the path of least resistance when it came to classes and course loads. We say that a good GPA is all that matters or that we want to have fun and not be stuck in the library all weekend. We even eschew our areas of interest in favor of easier, less interesting subjects.

Opinion

BARAN | Tinder?

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The “dating” app Tinder is ubiquitous at Cornell and most other college campuses. “Dating” is in quotations because, as most of us know, Tinder is usually not used to find significant others, although some have certainly had success in doing exactly that. Most Tinder users in my demographic see the app as a conduit to casual hookups. Tinder and other apps like it do have a function in society, but the way in which they’re used now is aiding the degradation of our society’s morals. At the risk of sounding like a prudish Luddite, let me explain.

Columns

BARAN | The Average and the Averagest

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I had a lot of time to reflect on my first year at Cornell this summer. During those reflections, I was plagued by one realization in particular: Cornell students have a massive superiority complex. Most of the students here go about their lives believing they are among an elite group of students that is smarter than the majority of their peers studying or working elsewhere. We look at college rankings, standardized test scores and other meaningless metrics, and construe our success in them as intellectual superiority. There’s a reason most of us are from privileged backgrounds.

Opinion

BARAN | Earth Day Upgrade

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Another Earth Day has come and gone. The lengthy Instagram stories of natural wonders have timed out and with their expiration has also gone most of the Earth-friendly sentiment they delivered for a day. Some of my friends in the Ecology House, where I live, complain about people who give the Earth shoutouts over social media on Earth Day but only continue with the same wasteful lifestyles the next. While I have noticed this phenomenon with certain people, it’s not the biggest problem I see with Earth Day. The holiday celebrates our planet and advocates better treatment of it, but it also ignores our treatment of Earth’s cherished non-human constituents.

Opinion

BARAN | What’s Your Venmo?

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Many of us at Cornell use some sort of mobile payment system multiple times a week, if not nearly every day. Venmo, Uber, Apple Pay, Lyft and PayPal are just some of the mobile payment platforms linked to our debit and credit cards that we rely on. Generation Zs and millennials turn first to mobile wallets when we’re with friends. But to our great frustration, we rarely find the same ease of payment when dealing with merchants. Potential buyers in our demographic often find ourselves unable to make purchases because we don’t have cash or a card on us in person.

Columns

BARAN | No Place Like Home

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Home for Fall Break. For Thanksgiving. For the deliciously long Winter Break. Back to familiar haunts, faces and foods. The mildly annoying barrage of “back at it” Snapchats and Instagram posts.