Opinion

SEX ON THURSDAY | A Hard Pill to Swallow

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I’ve been on the pill for four years and I can’t seem to break away from it. I trudge to Cornell Health once a month, dutifully retrieve my package of little blue tablets and force one down every night before bed. As much as I have thought about saying goodbye for good, I’m stuck in a (literal) cycle.

Columns

OBASEKI | The Misguidance of Moral Supremacy

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“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

The height of humility is admitting that you, the reader, might be the very subject of these words. Despite how morally righteous your philosophy, ideology, or movement may be, it’s ultimately subject to the corruptive nature of human beings in our desire for righteous indignation. It is understandable that we all want to be good people, or at least strive to do good. But this impulse inevitably leads us to consider ourselves either better than those who embody such ‘evil,’ or do not strive for the same good that we do.

Activism

ONONYE | Is Womansplaining Activism?

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In honesty, while I will be the first to say that Womansplaining is (definitely!) my favorite part of being a Cornell student, it doesn’t actually take me a lot to write my columns. I write most of them in an hour or two the Friday before they’re due to my editor. I prioritize my own experiences and thoughts (key my apt title: Womanplaining) and most of those experiences happened the week that I write: e.g. this week I went to a talk and now I’m writing about my thoughts from that talk, the week of the 2020 election I wrote about the election, when I ran for Student Assembly I wrote about Student Assembly. Obviously my opinion writing is different from writing my thesis or a class paper, but a lot of times they come from the same space. And the crux of the question is whether or not a writing about feminism is feminist activism. 

column

LIM | Turning Screens to Black and White this Lent Instead of Our Politics

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Under the influence of several friends who told me about the designed addictiveness of screens, I recently switched the color filter on my phone and laptop to black and white. I made this part of my observance of Lent, 40 days of simple, ascetic living observed by Christians in preparation for Easter. 

If Lent involves ethical progress via analogy — refraining from indulging in sugar to train the same discipline that refrains from indulging in excessive criticism — then being more conscious of literal surfaces, like laptop screens, acts as one of several possible reminders to not take what is immediately before us as all there is. I’ve since realized two things: One, that relative detachment from my screen was in line with Lenten principles to remove distractions from what was important; two, that spending less time with surfaces like my screen and having faith in what might be beyond had implications beyond the private domain of religion, and extended into public domains like politics. A secular description of faith by the psychoanalyst and nontheist Erich Fromm is, “a conviction which is rooted in one’s own experience,” or a belief in the value of pursuing data-informed visions of truth that eventually lead to scientific discoveries and social transformations — taking the surface, but daring to see beyond. This could be as practical as the environment and sustainability major disturbed by discouraging data on water pollution and flooding, but determined to study and someday apply the building of ditches.

Dining

AUSTIN | Throwing Stars and Sweatshirt Stains

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For the first installment of a Moosewood Mess, I started out with dessert because it seemed like a relatively easy first step — something very much within my comfort zone. I invited my friends for the inaugural Moosewood Meal, which only ramped up the pressure. I felt like I couldn’t disappoint them, but I also didn’t want to make something overly complicated and ruin everything before it even started. That brought me to Chocolate Cranberry Crunch bars and chocolate sugar cookies. 
When I first looked at the recipes, they seemed to be idiot-proof. However, it appears I’m an idiot.