Ed Observers

Hold off on your post-mortem

Decades from now, a student might glance at her course syllabus and see our generation, the early 2000s, listed as an area of study. We could be the focus because of our generation’s historical merit: our intrinsic interestingness, perhaps, or our events—migrations, movements, each taking years to manifest, all the way down to the minutiae […]

The personality cult of Bernie Sanders

It’s 2015, and Eugene V. Debs is either jumping for joy in the afterlife or spinning in his grave. If Debs is jumping for joy, it’s because his intellectual descendent, Bernie Sanders, is the closest any socialist has ever come to being elected President of the United States. Sanders is enjoying much more support than […]

SA: lift your veil

In the short nine months that I have spent at UR, the operations of the Students’ Association (SA) government have always seemed vaguely mysterious. This isn’t a surprise, since I was a freshman wrapped up in navigating my new, shiny environment for most of that time, and I didn’t make an effort to follow SA’s […]

Defend Planned Parenthood

The House of Representatives recently passed a bill to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Predictably, this sparked outrage over the right of the House to decide the future of sexual health for countless Americans. Let’s explore the biggest reason this bill was even conceived. In defense of the bill, Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla. said […]

Toeing the punchline

There’s a fine line between comedy and offensiveness. Ask anyone about a certain offensive comment, and there’ll be a mix of people proclaiming it as a horrible remark or heralding it as a wonderful joke. Where that line lies is a question that comedians have been asking for decades. And, now that society is pushing […]

Tim Tebow: the QB you deserve

After the first weekend of the NFL season, half of the teams will be entering the second week of the season with a losing record. This is expected. One other fact comes to mind when recapping the week—Tim Tebow did not play a down. Why? The Eagles had cut him. As someone who does not […]
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The opposite of apathy

For this article, I have chosen to talk about a less common topic: apathy. I always find it funny when, to seem cool, people say that they are generally apathetic about things. This is because those who are truly apathetic tend to not give an opinion of themselves. True apathy means that one wouldn’t have […]

Between the lines: a changing Turkey

It’s difficult to explain why I first chose to go to Turkey. Originally, I jumped into studying abroad (a requirement for my major, International Relations) with the understanding that it’d be best to get away from the “traditional” locations most people choose. My first academic experience abroad was in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. It is […]

The places you’ll go

In the words of Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go:” “Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away!” Congratulations, class of 2015! The author of your childhood wrote a book gifted to graduates across the country, and his rhyming words ring simple but true. “You have brains in […]

UR needs solutions that unite

Something that we’ve learned in the past year is that the Rochester community—on campus and in the city beyond—is not as tolerant as we had hoped it was. We assumed, perhaps naively, that college campuses would be a haven for intelligent, rational discussion, but a series of events in the past few semesters have indicated […]