Opinion Columns

Collin Boots | Robots don't kill people

Drones cannot be morally culpable for their actions. Using language attributing the actions of the operator to the machine needlessly distracts from the legitimate moral and legal concerns surrounding drone strikes.

Alexandra Friedman | Making a commitment to civic engagment

The idea of leaving the “ivory tower” of Penn often echoes throughout campus. It seems, however, not to have resonated with far too many students, who, like me as a freshman, rarely venture past 41st Street.

Jonathan Iwry | What is the human condition?

The things that fascinate me about the human condition, its most essential aspects, are so obvious and universal that you don’t need a class to discover them; you observe them just by living and seeing how others live.

Akshat Shekhar | The key to failure

We need to acknowledge that not only are these failures OK, but that they are inescapable for anyone trying to achieve on the daily basis what most students at Penn are.

Roderick Cook | Beyond "Born This Way"

We sometimes throw around this language with the best of intentions, but what are we really saying here? We are perpetuating the idea that queer and trans identities are things that we need to be OK with, but things that objectively are not good.

William Zhang and Jason Choi | Fitting in, branching out

In reflection, even seemingly inconsequential and superficial differences, such as the fact that the word “football” is somewhat of a misnomer in the United States (it should really be called something along the lines of “hand-egg”), that Americans don’t study “maths” (a red squiggly line just appeared under the word as I write)  or that the only affordable and edible Chinese food on campus  comes from food trucks (try Yue Kee), have a much greater psychological impact.

Frida Garza | Showing and not telling

If John Legend is really the right guy for [Commencement], I challenge the selection committee to share why they have picked him.

Alexandra Friedman | Redefining success

As long as our cultural definition of success requires that we identify “losers” among us, the ingredients for tragedy will be ever-present. When will we accept that we have already achieved success, just by being part of the Penn experience?

Jonathan Iwry | Reflections on the mortal coil

Michel de Montaigne once wrote that to philosophize is to learn how to die. That’s easy enough to say - as a philosophy major, I have spent many a term paper trying to solve some of the most intransigent questions ever asked.

Frida Garza | Good grief

Talking to someone inside four walls for an hour once a week should not be our only option. What we need right now is space to be together. And if we can’t do that outside College Hall, we will take to the internet.

Collin Boots | We're all blasphemous

Every single one of you reading this post is a blasphemer or a heretic to someone’s religion. The freedom of religion depends on the freedom to disagree with other religions. Blasphemy laws disallow that freedom in countless cases around the globe

Arielle Pardes | The little pink pill

But some women simply have lower libidos, and that’s completely normal. The growing interest in forms of “female Viagra” like Lady Prelox can make it seem like not feeling readily available for sex is an abnormality.

Akshat Shekhar | Getting to blah

We are to believe that a league in which three teams have signed Tim Tebow to a contract now considers media circuses anathema.

Sara Schonfeld | Be mine?

Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be about validation. As nice as it was to have a guy confirming that my butt is not strangely misshapen, whether or not someone says it, it’s still true. There’s no reason to spend a holiday trying to parade around relationship labels.

Diane Bayeux | Blue Eroticization

The controversy surrounding "Blue is the Warmest Color" has also been especially fierce because it is one of the first movies to display the relationship between two women without allowing its audience to reduce it to pornography.

Sam Sherman | Building Culture out of Chaos

Given Penn’s historic artistic presence and the many resources available to students now — including the ICA, the School of Design, a music program, arts residential programs, the Kelly Writers House, the ARCH building and countless other arts-related activities and places — it’s truly remarkable that art is so overlooked.

Jason Choi and William Zhang | Penn, where dreams go to … lucrativeness

While there’s often stigma attached to OCR and the mass migration of Wharton students toward the financial industry, I doubt many would criticize the fact that Penn is home to the East Coast’s biggest Hackathon “PennApps” and possesses a rich culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that has given rise to the likes of Venmo and Warby Parker.

Roderick Cook | Addressing identity (in just a few letters)

Even the smallest of words can have the ability to either reaffirm or invalidate someone’s identity. When it comes to gender, some of the most important words are usually only a few letters long: pronouns.

Alexandra Friedman | The power of the social network

On my newsfeed, I have discovered articles, videos, Buzzfeed lists and pictures that have made me laugh, cry, empathize and understand.

Collin Boots | Not ready for Ravi

It concerns me greatly to see so many intelligent Penn students praising Zacharias as an intellectual heavyweight. Ravi is an expert rhetorician and apologist, but his views and arguments hardly deserve the term intellectual.