I love reading. But, there is one glaring caveat: I do not love reading textbooks. Recently, I opened my first one in two years and found that it took me forever to finish 10 pages. But even so, I still love reading: the act of finding meaning everywhere and anywhere.
President Barack Obama yesterday announced a plan to cut the national debt by about $3 trillion over the span of a decade. The initiative, much like the jobs plan introduced last week, is no doubt part of Obama's effort to keep his own job come next election.
Would you spend $20,000 on a text message? Tomorrow, you will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate will allocate that amount for the creation of a text−messaging system. But before you vote on Referendum 1, you'll want to ask yourself a few questions: Do we need it? Would it work? And would it be worth it?
After two long weeks of getting your campus newspaper fix every other weekday, here it is: your first true daily Daily of fall 2011.
In Tuesday's school-wide Tufts Community Union Senate election, students will be voting on Referendum 1, which would allocate $20,000 to TuftsLife to lease and operate an SMS short code, TUFTS (88387), for 12 months.
The Obama administration's China policy came under scrutiny again — this time over Taiwan.
In May 1971, upwards of 17 years into the Second Indochina War and not long before the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon, a photograph of South Vietnam's vice president appeared on the cover of Ramparts Magazine. Next to him were the words: "Marshal Ky: Biggest Pusher in the World?"
Raise your hand if you know how Tufts Mock Trial performed last year. Seriously, go ahead, put your hand up; the dining hall is too crowded for anyone to notice.
For the second time in two years, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is threatening to close its Tufts branch.
Clear the mechanism," says a weary Billy Chapel for the last time in his illustrious 19−year career. Suddenly, he no longer hears the grinding of the D Train that rumbles through the Bronx, nor the thundering echoes of the 56,000 New Yorkers that populated Yankee Stadium on that historic September night. Chapel was chasing perfection. For the final time, the tall, slender 40−year−old grips the fastball that had brought him within reach of baseball's most prized pinnacle. He records the final out of the game and for the first time in its history, the Cathedral in the Bronx falls silent.
For incoming freshmen, Fall Ball is a Tufts rite of passage. The event has the potential to be a blast, but there's just one problem: actually getting into the venue.
A curious thing happened while I was ordering a book for my Classics class, "Latin, Greek, and Arabic." When I order books online, I tend to look at the reviews. This particular book, "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture," focuses on the medieval period when Islamic Arabs in Baghdad translated countless books on science and technology from the ancient Greeks; this knowledge then spread to medieval Europe, which sparked the Renaissance. The book, however, received some extremely negative reviews not because it had been written poorly or inaccurately, but because the author had made some controversial comments at the outset of the Iraq War several years ago. In fact, it is important to note that the two worst reviews of this book were written in 2004, a time when anti−Islamic emotions reached a pinnacle.
The beginning of the new school year means that those of you in the Class of 2015 must begin to think about not only what you want to be, but also who you want to be. For our returning students, it provides an opportunity to reflect on your previous years and to make adjustments both in your coursework and also in your decisions about your life in the community. For most of you, this is a fine−tuning process; pushing yourself to pursue something you have wanted to try and maybe finding the willpower to avoid something that has caused you concern. For new students, this is inevitably a time for experimentation. This was the first big social weekend of the year. It seems to me that the experimentation didn't go so well for too many new students, and that there are some things for all of us to reflect upon.
It's all too tempting to think of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a closed chapter in our history.
Sometimes the problems facing our country seem despairingly large and complicated without any feasible solutions in sight. The gap between the wealthy and the impoverished relentlessly grows as more than 15 percent of citizens are unable to find a full-time job. Small businesses face rising rents, growing health care costs and heavy competition from "big-box" and Internet retailers who offer cheaper prices to consumers while failing to pay a living wage to their workers. At the same time, "70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts last year [and] 84 percent anticipate cuts this year," according to the Center on Education Policy.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Welcome to Tufts, Class of 2015! I'm proud to be able to call each and every one of you a fellow Jumbo.
I have just arrived freshly scrubbed and clear−headed in the United States, ready to start a graduate degree at Tufts. Despite having flown nearly 4,000 miles from my native London, I am confident that fitting in should be easy. After all, I am from a Western culture permeated with American fashion, music and consumables. Indeed, were it not for this fashion influence, our British boys might still be wearing their trousers over their underwear rather than perched below their buttocks wedges. If I were a student of physics, I might be tempted to examine this gravity−defying fashion statement further, but I digress.
It's no secret that WikiLeaks is one of the most controversial organizations in the world. "We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices," reads the first paragraph of the group's website.
My summers tend to be boring and work-filled, so I try to eke entertainment from wherever I can find it. One unexpected source of excitement came from the debt-ceiling crisis and the run up to the presidential election in 2012. I would not categorize myself as particularly politically active other than when I drunkenly voice my opinions with friends at 2 a.m. I did vote in the last election for John McCain and for a while considered myself a Republican. My opinions changed this summer with the unfolding of the standoff between Democrats and Republicans.
By now you must have heard that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc., has decided to resign from the post of CEO. If you haven't, you should be checking the New York Times on your iPad a little more often — welcome to the modern world. Over the past 15 years most have showered Jobs with superlatives like innovator, visionary, genius. None of these can be denied. I, more than anyone else, believe in the fact that Jobs has reshaped not just the tech industry but also the music, movie, cell phone and cloud computing industries. I personally believe the tech industry at its core is about making lives easier. No one has done that better than Steve Jobs.
Op-ed submissions are an integral part of our connection with you, our readers. As such, we would like to clarify our guidelines for submitting op-eds and what you can expect from the process.
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