34th Street Magazine's "Toast" is a semi-weekly newsletter with the latest on Penn's campus culture and arts scene. Delivered Monday-Wednesday-Friday.
Free.
Recruiter's Row is a biweekly recruitment newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on all things employment related. Get it in your inbox every other Wednesday. Free.
It’s been more than two weeks since my last column. I have had ample time to think about a topic, to write a rough draft, to set aside a few hours to bang out seven hundred words or so.
In June, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York signed into law an executive order that created a blacklist of entities that have boycotted or divested from Israel (commonly associated with the boycott, divest and sanction, or BDS, movement), banning them from receiving taxpayer funding.
Two weeks ago I promised a disparaging NSO column. I’m lucky world events lined up so well. Like most of you, I was shocked to read about the drama in the wake of Canada’s carbon summit last week: In response to a proposed universal $10 CAD tax per ton in 2018, Nova Scotia’s minister left the building.
When I found out that I would be writing this column, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t write opinions that were so obvious that no rational person could possibly disagree with them: The uselessness of bag checks at Van Pelt, the uselessness of the Penn’s student government and Trump.
First we ruined the workforce, then marriage, then (somehow) the Olympics, and now, according to a recent New York Times article, even the election may not be safe from millennials.
The daily news updates of unlawful police shootings against black men and women has led to much hashtagged outrage: solidarity nowadays means expressing communal dissatisfaction.
US universities seem to believe that the right to consider race in college admissions, which they originally desired in order aid disadvantaged black applicants, now also allows them to set an enrollment cap on another US minority.
The interesting thing about the press is although we expend an enormous amount of time and energy investigating everyone else’s business, the actual mechanisms of the press are often opaque.
While the rest of the world sees our violence, turbulence, and political instability, they also see that we at least still hold on to the integrity of our anger and our desire to listen and be heard worldwide.
If we, as a community, would wish for our incoming classes to be truly composed of the best students Penn can find, rather than the elite few who serve the University’s self-promotional needs, then we ought not to celebrate our yield rate.
I assumed Trump would understand the national electorate. I assumed he would adjust his strategy and pivot to the general election. I might have been wrong.
he College Board’s 6,000 member institutions — including Penn — are the only ones who can reasonably hold the College Board accountable. Universities should push the College Board to explain where all of those testing profits go.
The media, at its best, is a vehicle for information. At its worst, it reflects the ugliest of our prejudices back at us, and I’m concerned over how the latter disguises itself as the former.