Columns

SCHECHTER | The Bottom Tier

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Last week, I sweated through my bedsheets for five nights in a row. Upstate New York was suffering through record heat and, like most of you, my dorm room has no air conditioning. A decision that probably made sense at the time when it rarely ever got hot enough to need it. Until, that is, the era of climate change.

My sleepless nights, coupled with what I’m learning in GOVT 2294: Politics of Climate Change led me to think not about my own discomfort, but about how hard an anthropogenically warmed world will be for people in underdeveloped regions, poverty-stricken areas, my children, their children and the generation after them who won’t be able to survive in Earth’s natural climate.

Columns

SENZON | Reigniting My Passion for Learning in a New Season

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I spent eight weeks of my summer in Buffalo, NY as a High Road fellow working for a non-profit known as Partnership for the Public Good that focuses on improving its communities through three main pillars: research on democratic organzations nationally, evaluating the efficacy of experimental models of the law and civic engagement writ large. This was my first experience working a 9 to 5 while commuting and working in a physical office space — it was all new to me. Previous internships I’d held used hybrid structures or were exclusively remote, so this took significant adjustment.

Everyday was a challenge in an unfamiliar city where I was learning to live on my own outside of my usual college campus environment; I had to learn to make compromises and clearly communicate with roommates on setting boundaries. Cooking for myself and making sure I was well-fed was a behemoth of its own, but I found a new passion for culinology that I didn’t know lived inside of me.

Columns

NGUYEN | My Platonic Awakening

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But, the optimist in me as loud — and I’m doing my best to listen. If the pandemic taught me to value platonic touch, maybe post-pandemic life will watch me put that lesson into practice. Once it’s safe, and with respect to my friends’ personal boundaries, I’m excited to rewrite my approach to social interactions. To give hugs and hold hands, to link arms and lean on shoulders. To fill my moments with the warmth of physical touch. To embrace the people I love with the new language I’ve learned to love with.

Arts & Culture

Curating a Summer Reading List

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If you, like me, are looking forward to some reading this summer, let’s embark on this ill-fated journey together. Will we achieve our reading goals? Almost certainly not. Will we still enjoy the act of resistance that is leisure in a society that values only productivity? We must — or perish.