Columns

Columns

Humans of Tufts: Sophia Nuñez

By Sophia Grekin | April 15

​​Sophia Grekin (SG): Can you talk about your first love?

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Column

Innocent Pleasures: An ode to Laundry Day and Carm’s charm

By JoJo Lee | April 15

In the words of 2000s pop icon Hannah Montana, “Everybody makes mistakes, everybody has those days.” In my case, days were entire semesters spent sorely mistaken. This fortnight I’m shedding light not on the greatness of “Hannah Montana” (2006–2011) and other such defining shows of Disney Channel’s golden age — they need neither defense nor endorsement to be enthusiastically and unapologetically appreciated — but on the naivety of first-year me, who on any given day unhesitatingly answered with undue confidence “Dewick” to the age-old question of one’s dining hall preference.

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Columns

Public Cinemy No. 1: ‘The Batman’ fails in its social justice commentary

By Sacha Waters | April 15

Every time I watch another superhero blockbuster, I can’t help but imagine the producers sitting around a table, breathing down the screenwriters’ necks as they decide which social issues to water down, aestheticize and shoehorn in. Will it be something contemporary, like the pandemic? A timeless classic, like misogyny? Or a safe choice, like wealth inequality?

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Columns

Kolumn: What we mean when we talk about nostalgia

By Koloris Wu | April 15

Nostalgia is a Greek compound. It is the combination of the word νόστος (nóstos) or “homecoming” and ἄλγος (álgos), “pain and ache.” This deconstruction of the word precisely describes, in my opinion, the exclusively human feeling of bittersweetness, a mix of emotions that evoke a larger complex of sentiments.

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Column

The Journey: Jumbo Month

By Liz Buehl | April 15

During the winter of 2020, my first semester at Tufts, I often had doubts if I had picked the right school for me. COVID-19 restrictions were tight, and the tension of final exams swirled in the air. There were moments when a sleety, wintry mix whipped across the Residential Quad and it felt as though the beige cinderblock walls of my room were closing in on my wooden desk and creaky twin-XL bed. I would be lying if I told you I never thought of packing up my sweaters and taking the next flight back home. All I knew of a college education was awkward Zoom breakout rooms, silent, solo study sessions, and virtual office hours with professors I had never met in person.

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Columns

Potty Talk: Pearson Part 1 — level of discharge

By David Wingens | April 14

I have never been in a Tufts building as mystifying as the Michael wing of Pearson Hall. To get there, you need only enter Pearson’s front door, take a right and then walk down a long, foreboding corridor as the decor slowly morphs decades into the past. The architect of this wing (presumably the eponymous “Michael”) seems to have been obsessed with bathrooms. Every floor in the Michael wing’s stairwell is marked in reference to its distance from the “discharge floor.” Naturally, I made it my goal to find this discharge floor and rigorously test its bathrooms (using the scientific method, of course).

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Columns

Micro-trend of the Week: Woke jeans

By RaiAnn Bu | April 14

Fashion is one of the strongest social performances of gender expression. Through clothing, one communicates social status, identity, affiliations and values, allowing fashion to be one of the apparent rebellions against gender conformity as well as the strongest chain to the gender binary.

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Column

The Spectrum: Idaho’s abortion bill

By Kristin Shiuey | April 14

Idaho adopted an abortion bill that closely resembled Texas’ abortion ban on March 23. Idaho’s new abortion law bans most abortions after about six weeks and allows anyone to sue an individual that may have had a hand in the procedure. It is similar to Texas’ bill in nearly every sense, but unlike Texas’ abortion bill, Idaho legislators deemed it reasonable for abortions to be carried out in cases of rape or incest.

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Columns

The Wraparound: Hockey minds spar over Zegras’ sweet skills

By Timothy Valk | April 14

He’s done it again. Trevor Zegras has dropped the jaws of the hockey world. In just his rookie year, Zegras, a 6-foot-0, 185-pound, 21-year-old from Bedford, N.Y. has earned a reputation as one of the most skilled and most creative players in the NHL playing for the Anaheim Ducks. He goes for the deke, the dangle, the spin-o-rama, the lacrosse pass, the no-look shot, all effortlessly. One would think that for a league accused of being outdated at times, this kind of ingenuity would be welcomed, but this hasn’t exactly been the case.

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Column

Managing Multipolarity: Back to Bonapartism

By Daniel Chung | April 13

The French are known to possess a bit of a superiority complex; they think their food is better, their wines are better, their cheeses are better, and they think their way of doing politics is better too. This isn’t entirely without a cause; historically, France’s sphere of influence has been formidable, extending at various times from encompassing most of Western Europe to possessing colonies in the Americas, India, France and Southeast Asia. In an age of monumental political changes with the absence of waning American influence, it almost makes instinctive sense that France would continue to be among the nations that rise above the rest.

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Columns

The Final Whistle: Tammy Abraham’s breakout season in Serie A

By Bharat Singh | April 13

Since leaving Chelsea in August 2021, Tammy Abraham has found incredible goalscoring form and is enjoying one of the best seasons of his career. Despite successful loan spells at Aston Villa and Swansea, many doubted his ability to excel in a foreign league. Under José Mourinho, Abraham has established himself as the club’s starting center-forward, taking over from Edin Džeko, and has been the difference in tight games when Roma struggles to create chances.

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Column

The Biggest Misconceptions About College Life: The best four years of your life

By Stephany Sestini | April 12

“Legally Blonde” (2001), “Neighbors” (2014) and “American Pie 2” (2001) are just a few examples of Hollywood’s many attempts to portray an unrealistic stereotype of college life. Of all the phases we experience throughout our lives, from learning how to read to seeing our grandchildren grow up, many claim that college is by far the best out of them all. “It will be the best four years of your life,” my family said. Growing up, all I cared about was working as hard as I possibly could to get into a prestigious university; I was more than ready to experience the most unforgettable and thrilling four years of my life. You can imagine my disappointment as I began my first few weeks as a first-year when I slowly realized that college life was not even remotely similar to how Hollywood movies and my relatives had depicted it. The ultimate truth is that the four years you spend in college might be the best of your life but they also might not.

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Columns

A Compendium of Actors: Lily Collins can do it all

By Henry Chandonnet | April 12

Often, we try to box actors and actresses into their appropriate category: indie actor here, big-budget action star there. This column has surely fallen prey to that same difficulty, establishing genres and niches that actors may unilaterally fill. Still, actors are not monoliths. They can do what they like, take on the projects they want and thus spread their talents far beyond a singular career pathway. This multifacetedness is exemplified by Lily Collins, an actress who takes on both trashy Netflix shows and prestigious Oscar films and does so with ease. This is a testament to her talent; Collins is able to tackle a myriad of roles, making her a jack of all trades.

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Columns

Sports and Society: America’s game drain

By Oliver Fox | April 12

Brittney Griner, the WNBA megastar and two-time Olympic gold medalist, has been detained in Russia since February. That’s obviously crazy, but not for the reasons you might think. 

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Columns

The Art of Good Soup: Lucky and charming

By Sadie Leite and Ellie Lester | April 11

We are tired. Sadie has purple feet (and them dogs are BARKING). Ellie ate salsa for breakfast. With salt. But it was pico de gallo, which makes it a little better?

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Column

Kate in Paris: In Bordeaux

By Kate Seklir | April 11

This weekend, along with the rest of the Tufts-in-Paris program, I boarded an early-morning train from Paris’ Gare Montparnasse and set off toward Bordeaux, a city in the southwest of France and a part of the country’s Aquitaine region.

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Ethics of the Environment: The consequences of fast fashion

By Ethan Jaskowiak | April 11

Perusing through stores like H&M and Forever 21, it’s difficult not to be struck by how affordable clothing has become and to wonder how clothing companies, especially those known as fast-fashion brands, can peddle clothing so cheaply. Most people are aware of the textile industry’s connections to child labor and worker exploitation in developing nations, but it is also important to address the industry’s heavy contribution to our worsening environmental crisis. 

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Columns

Public Cinemy No. 1: Narrative corruption within ‘The Dropout’

By Sacha Waters | April 8

I will admit I love Hulu’s “The Dropout” (2022), a highly-anticipated miniseries on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It’s beautifully written, beautifully shot and beautifully acted. Even teachers at my high school, Holmes’ alma mater, have commented on how well the miniseries captured Holmes’ eccentric character. But the show occasionally falls into the pothole of becoming what it means to analyze: America’s obsession with narrative smoke and mirrors.

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Columns

The Intangibles: My NBA momentum winners losers

By Aiden Herrod | April 8

Momentum in basketball is everything. Teams that are playing their best basketball in the crunch months of March and April are often more likely to succeed than higher-seeded counterparts who did all their winning in November and December. This creates final standings that can mislead the casual or even seasoned fan when bracket-filling time comes. Ultimately, my favorite picks for the NBA Finals are the teams that win the most games after lineups have been tweaked, film has been analyzed and chemistry has been built.

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Blue, Brown, & Green — Monkey see, monkey do

By Natalie Brownsell | April 8

Boston and its surrounding cities are beautiful places. One thing decidedly not beautiful is the litter that mars the woods and streets throughout Greater Boston. Unfortunately, I have, at times, seen a similar scene on campus. Though Tufts facilities might clean up litter occasionally, the responsibility for keeping our campus beautiful is a community-wide one. Littering is a serious problem in the U.S.;in a national litter study done by Keep America Beautiful in 2020, it was determined that there were “nearly 50 billion pieces of litter along U.S. roadways and waterways” throughout the country. That equates to 152 items of litter for every person in the United States per year.

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