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The Setonian
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The Weekly Chirp: To mock a mockingbird

The undergraduate experience brings numerous changes to a student’s life, like living away from home and having a beer for the first time upon reaching the appropriate legal age. A perhaps less conspicuous change that occurs throughout our college years is an alteration in our verbal vocabulary. Coming ...



The Setonian
Columns

Looking out: 1938 — the end of history

How you are taught history shapes the way you understand the world. For most of us, there is no choice about how we learn history, like what is included in our curriculum and what is not. In Turkey, history education is part of the national curriculum that everyone needs to study, and there are very ...


The Setonian
Column

Thoughts from places: Carmichael Hall

Content warning: This column mentions blood/needles and HIV.The line that usually wraps around Carmichael Dining Center in the early hours of the afternoon was missing. Last Friday, the particular buzz of a hungry crowd of college students, freshly starved by lecture halls and study sessions, was absent. ...


1000-5
Columns

In Defense of the Butterfly Effect: The best way out

“Did you remember to bring your winter things?”My grandfather misses me, expresses his care over the phone. I laugh and glance down at my short sleeves: we are not in for a cold winter. Weather projections I’ve read online predict warmth ahead, and, plus, the leaves have only just begun to fall. ...


The Setonian
Columns

Murphy's Law: Understanding income inequality

On Oct. 23, Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, posted an article to LinkedIn titled “Our Biggest Economic, Social and Political Issue The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60%.” In it, he breaks down the differing economic conditions of those ...




The Setonian
Columns

P.S. …: Is "Me Too" enough?

I, like most women I imagine, could say “me too” about several instances. These range from being groped by strangers, to street harassment, to assault, to discovering that a high school teacher and mentor was a sexual predator once I had graduated. And therein lies an important message — sexual ...


Matthew-Soderberg
Column

Citizen Shame: The 'Cat' that won't leave your head

My seventh grade French class is memorable for two things: that time I spilled my entire water bottle on the girl sitting next to me and the relentless screenings of French-dubbed movies.Maybe it was our class’ fascination with cinema, but it more likely had to do with our teacher’s lack of belief ...


The Setonian
Columns

Eat Your Heart Out: Ricotta cake

With midterm season well underway, I think we can all agree that a quick, hearty treat would really hit the spot right about now. Fortunately, I was able to find a recipe for ricotta cake, which my grandmother would make when there was a party in the works that required great planning and an even greater ...



The Setonian
Column

Is This Thing On? Music on the brain

With the advent of the internet, we are living a huge portion of our lives online. As a result, our personal information is being tracked and recorded everywhere, all the time. If you subscribe to a music streaming service, this is especially true. Now, you might choose not to publish what you’re playing to your friends (private session for those guilty pleasures), but you are always providing this information to the streaming platform. That’s a crazy amount of data! It’s not only what you listen to, but how you listen to it. Do you find a new song and listen to it on repeat for three hours? Which songs do you skip over on shuffle, and which will you stop and rewind? Are you more likely to leave your playlist untouched, or do you obsessively curate the queue? 


The Setonian
Columns

Bored & Confused: Am I an elitist?

At Tufts, students seem to despise the wealthy classes, striking down anything that represents power, aristocracy or elitism. Tufts students think of themselves as above the elitist nature one would find at, say, Harvard. We’re down to earth. We don’t sell out to Wall Street. We’re quirky. However, ...


The Setonian
Columns

The Equalizer: What we can learn from Belgium

In September of 2006, Michel Sablon, Belgian soccer’s newly appointed technical director, was putting the finishing touches on his blueprint for Belgium soccer’s revolution. Only eight years later, at the 2014 World Cup, Belgium was positioned as the fifth-best team going into the tournament, according ...


The Setonian
Columns

Failing Big: No relevant experience required

Tufts Dance Collective (TDC) applications are terrifying in a way that other, more normal applications are not. Getting rejected from groups with skill-based application processes hurts because it’s them telling me that I don’t have what it takes; getting rejected from TDC says that they just don’t like me as a person.


The Setonian
Column

Thoughts From Places: Distler Hall

Last Wednesday, for the first time since arriving at Tufts, I made my way over to Distler Hall to see an actual performance and not an orientation program. Despite my overall lack of understanding of the Spanish language, I was talked into going to Argentinean multi-instrumentalist and singer Clara ...


Henry-Stevens
Columns

The Weekly Chirp: To go or not to go

With the onset of fall arrives an unavoidable question: what am I going to do during winter break? The extended time at home can be daunting for some, especially for those of us living in New England, who are especially restricted in our ability to leave the house due to terrible weather. A trip down ...


The Setonian
Columns

Looking Out: The discontents of universal basic income

Over the past few years, as the facts of the automation revolution dawns on many involved in creating it, there has been increased talk of a universal basic income (UBI) coming out of Silicon Valley. This new discourse on UBI has been a favorite topic of many tech billionaires from Elon Musk to Mark ...


Goldberg
Columns

Bird's Eye View: Our values have changed, have sports?

Athletics have transformed since their inception. In Greece, the first Olympic Games was held in 760 B.C. and consisted of a simple footrace. Later the traditional field events of discus, javelin and jumping were added along with an early predecessor of wrestling called pankration. Among the Greek city-states, ...


The Setonian
Columns

Postgame Press: A cute new tradition and social media

With all of the serious topics I have written about in the past few weeks, I think it is finally time to write about one of the biggest, cutest, nicest smile-bringers in sports: waving to the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital.Every game at the end of the first quarter, the University of Iowa ...