A century ago, the Ottoman Empire was ridiculed as the sick man of Europe. This is no longer the case. Among the great powers which I have detailed as likely to return to the scene, Turkey is one I am especially bullish on.
The first round of the French presidential elections came straight from a textbook. Held on April 10, the elections sent current President Emmanuel Macron, head of the centrist political party La République En Marche! (“The Republic On The Move” in English), to the second round with an admirable 27.85% of the vote.
Students have long expressed frustration over the university’s lack of budget transparency and its implications for admissions. The rate of Tufts’ students receiving financial aid has remained low and stagnant, hovering around 46% for the past five years, according to the university factbook. Tufts has long practiced “need-aware” admissions, meaning a students’ ability to pay is a factor when deciding whether or not they will be admitted. As such, the university should take steps to ensure Tufts is more accessible for lower-income students.
Two weeks ago, Tufts released information about the admitted students of Class of 2026. The selectivity and demographic diversity of the admitted students pool offers vital insight to Tufts’ future.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
For Tufts students, it’s clear the university is expanding — it’s also clear that Tufts cannot bear this expansion. From longer lines in the dining halls to difficulties registering for classes, and the ever-present chaos of housing strains, the university is already struggling to accommodate the needs of all its current students.
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.
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.
Welcome to the second installation of a two-part series on Japan’s grand strategy and future as a great power. The first part can be found here.
As cannabis legalization continues its march across the country and investment in legal cannabis continues to grow, many previously veiled aspects of cannabis cultivation have come to light, including a surprisingly damaging environmental cost. High water and energy usage, pesticides and fertilizer poisoning, degradation of public lands and potential ozone effects have all been linked to cannabis cultivation.
Globalization, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy,” is inextricably tied to the global inequality that has shaped the lives of billions across the globe. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez suggest globalization has led to an increasing gap between the rich and poor. The 2022 World Inequality Report highlights this gap, finding that the globe’s richest 10% have 75% of global income while the poorest 50% of individuals share just 2% of income. The issue of global inequality is exacerbated by a number of factors like gender and race. For example, research shows that women make up just 27% of individuals in the top 10% of the income distribution and less than 17% at the 1% income level. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, racial discrimination is also prevalent in the discussion of global inequality, with white workers earning approximately 22% more than Black workers. Other data strengthens this finding, highlighting that a median Black family owns $24,100 in wealth compared to the average $189,100 held by a median white family. Globalization has certainly played a role in increasing this high level of global inequality.
Tensions between the United States and Russia over the invasion of Ukraine have made their way to the outer space domain. The packet of sanctions announced on Feb. 24 included measures directly targeting the Russian space program. Addressing this, President Biden remarked that “[the sanctions] will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program.”
This year, the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship class run by the Institute of Global Leadership at Tufts has been guided by the theme “Problems without Passports.” As an environmental studies and international relations major, the relevance and urgency of this framework is evident. Environmental scholars increasingly cite the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem, which calls for understanding an ‘instance’ of environmental degradation on a wider spatial and temporal scale. Just as the effects of climate change are dispersed over time and space to be felt unevenly by those who have had little hand in causing it, pollution and toxicity created in one place will not be neatly contained out of sight and out of body.
“During my moving day as a freshman, I remember walking up the stairs and catching a glimpse of who I know today as my husband. As soon as our eyes met, I knew he was the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with,” my cousin said. Almost everyone has heard a passionate and cheesy story about someone who met the love of their life in college. Whether it described the fascinating, first eye contact they made with their future significant other across the foyer or the accidental cliché bump into their soulmate while grabbing food at the dining hall, the notion of meeting ‘the one’ in college has been around for years.
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest has been profound and consistent over the last several decades, but in the last few years it has drastically accelerated and is nearing a critical point. As we have seen little progress from conservation efforts, our only hope has been that the rainforest can rebound on its own, but research is showing that this will not always be the case. The damage to the Amazon is making it more susceptible to and less equipped to recover from environmentally damaging events and activities like droughts, logging and fires. The changes to the rainforest are becoming irreversible.
Of the 92.9 quadrillion British thermal units of energy consumed by the U.S. in 2020, 62.3 quads were considered “rejected energy” by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This means that more than two-thirds of the energy consumed in the U.S. in 2020 was released into the environment — mostly as heat — and provided no economic or societal benefit at all. In other words, over two-thirds of all energy consumed in 2020 was wasted. This waste comes from inefficiencies in technology that allow energy to be lost as heat while converting one form of energy into another or while running technology.
Since the end of the Second World War, Japan has been a secondary power unwilling to exert the hard power associated with great power status, with a constitution “[renouncing] war as a sovereign right of the nation.” However, after this recent period of military isolationism characterized by the Yoshida doctrine — which passed responsibility for Japanese security policy to the U.S. — Japan is primed to enter another expansionist phase, although the form, extent and characteristics of this expansionism have not yet been settled.
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