Columns

RUBASHKIN | Yom Kaepernick

By |

Today marks the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is a time of celebration for my people; we eat sweet foods, drink sweet wine and try with all our might to get some sort of sound out of the shofar but never manage to do so (okay, maybe the last one is just me). Rosh Hashanah is a joyous holiday, a time for us to enjoy family, friends and life. Seven days from now, however, there will be no celebration. In seven days, there is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.

america

RUBASHKIN | God Bless Football

By |

Full disclosure: I was going to use my column this week to announce my forthcoming presidential candidacy, but then I remembered that I once had pneumonia in second grade, so I guess I’m disqualified from ever doing that. All jokes aside, is America really going to hand over the nuclear codes to an unstable, self-serving sentient Cheeto because Hillary Clinton was dehydrated? Come on, people, a little perspective never hurt anybody. In other news, my beloved Giants took on and defeated Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints in New York’s home opener. The Big Blue Wrecking Crew is 2-0 for the first time since 2009, Victor Cruz is catching game-winning touchdowns, Eli Manning is having his best statistical season ever and Odell Beckham Jr. is being Odell Beckham Jr. — life is pretty good for this perpetually disappointed fan.

Columns

MORADI | O Say, Can’t You See?

By |

A comment that Asma Khalid, a campaign reporter for NPR, made on the September 1 edition of the NPR politics podcast has relentlessly made the rounds in my thoughts like a SpongeBob-style earworm. Khalid’s colleague, Sam Sanders, spoke briefly on Colin Kaepernick’s protest and what it meant for Sanders to be American as a black man, to which Khalid, a Muslim woman, responded, “I will say, no matter where I am at any campaign event, particularly if it is a Republican campaign event […] I stand. Even if I’ve got a laptop in my hand. And I put my hand up just to ensure that I make everyone in the crowd feel comfortable with me.”
Khalid’s statement is woefully poetic. To ensure that I make everyone in the crowd feel comfortable with me.

Columns

BANKS | Reason #972 for Writing

By |

If someone were to misread one of my pieces, they might mistakenly assume that I am an angry or unhappy person. Yet anyone who knows me must know, I hope, that this couldn’t be further from the truth. While I certainly have every right to be or feel angry (and let’s not get that twisted), I am actually just an unflinchingly honest person — or, at least, I try to be. I harbor no bitterness in my heart, only an irrepressible impulse towards love and truth — love and truth, I reiterate, because the former is incomplete without the latter. Please, let me explain.

Blogs

POP CULTURE, POLITICS AND PERCEPTION | The Use of Terror

By |

I have often wondered why the world insists that ISIS is not a state. I understand that there is power in being a state and giving any power to these terrorists seems inherently wrong. Yet, terror seems to be at the heart of many nations’ foundings, and while it seems to be on a new scale, when did we as a world forget our own history? Was it once the fear was gone? The danger of the past becomes more forgivable, especially when you have to live with the product.

america

WATCH ME IF YOU CAN | Hollywood and the Blacklist

By |

The 2015 biopic Trumbo depicts the struggle that many screenwriters faced during the Red Scare. Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston), along with nine other screenwriters, was tried and charged for contempt of Congress under the accusation of writing films promoting anti-American ideals.  As a consequence, he and many other writers faced blacklisting, forbidding them from writing and getting paid, wasting an enormous amount of talent. After his jail time, he decided to use the loopholes in his court orders to his advantage. Trumbo wrote films under the identity of Robert Rich (another screenwriter who was away on military leave) and even won an Academy Award for Best Original Story for The Brave One.

Columns

BHOWMICK | Poverty of Aspirations

By |

There is a salient reason why the contumacious phrase “Make America Great Again” has become so popular. A lot of clubs that I am a part of on campus have crafted innocuous modifications of Trump’s catchphrase to inspire members and inject wit in agenda e-mails. The words “Make _______ Great Again” will definitely crop up on some organization’s Slope Day shirts by the end of semester. There is so much more to these words than mere rhetoric. Noam Chomsky’s cogent argument attributing Trump’s ascent to “deeply rooted — and potentially fatal feelings of fear and anger.”
There have been several theories attempting to demystify the emerging approbation for Trump’s jingoism.

Arts & Culture

What to Avoid Next

By |

When Michael Moore responded to the deaths of 12 innocent high school students with Bowling for Columbine, no one could have argued against the film’s political significance. A fiery critique of congressional negligence to curb gun violence, Moore’s impassioned documentary was so charged with a palpable, collective anger that many still refer to it as one of the most compelling political statements made by any documentarian. Even watching Bowling for Columbine nearly a decade after its initial release as an Australian high school student did little to weaken my appreciation of its persuasive fury. And the fact that U.S. legislators have failed to account for the thousands of victims of gun violence and have written off their deaths as an acceptable cost for the preservation of a 200-year-old constitutional amendment has only strengthened the contemporary legacy of Moore’s most important work. Moore’s latest film, Where to Invade Next — despite being deceptively titled to suggest a censure of American foreign policy — focuses on social welfare offered by other countries that Moore believes America ought to imitate.

america

GRANT | American Superiority Complex, Enslaved to Identity

By |

As Cornellians we are called to highest level of intellectual introspection and reflection. One step towards understanding ourselves is realizing that the American society pushes us to establish our identity through “othering”: the act of labeling people as “others” different from ourselves. Our ontology is formed using an “us” versus “them” system. “We” are “us” because “they” are “them.” Through residential segregation we distanced ourselves. Our suburbs emerged through the creation of ghettos.