Hold the cynics
(04/26/10 8:00am)
Once upon a time, American volunteers abroad were not regarded as uncomfortably-dressed gypsies hawking western remedies to skeptical villagers like scenes from a Marquez novel.
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Once upon a time, American volunteers abroad were not regarded as uncomfortably-dressed gypsies hawking western remedies to skeptical villagers like scenes from a Marquez novel.
If there existed a pill that could allow you to stay awake for three days with little side effect and risk of addiction, would you take it?
Among monologues about babies, rape and battling bulimia, the search for self-confidence was a major underlying theme in this weekend’s “All of the Above,” a monologue show by Duke women about Duke life.
LMFAO and Lil Jon ask in “Shots,” their spring break anthem, “All of the alcoholics, where you at?” After a week in the Florida panhandle, I’d venture to say that they were in Panama City, where wet T-shirt contests, all-night foam parties and the verve to wash off one’s scruples in the nippy ocean were motivated by shots shot shots and more shots.
The bromance amongst my guy friends back home is a lovely sight to behold. When they get together, beer, poker and interminable hours of watching basketball (or football, baseball, hockey…) often follow. Indeed, it’s a real bro and brah-fest, but cut through the valley dude vernacular and you’ll find the stuff of real love stories.
In the wake of another weekend, the commons room is a mess. Mustard and ketchup, swirled across the carpet and linoleum, has lionized a crass four-letter slur about a female body part. The culprits? Footloose scofflaws, likely inebriated, who committed the task under the auspices of cowardice and anonymity. We may safely assume that they were Dukies.
When it comes to coffee, I prefer taste, price and convenience over how it is made. I don’t seek out bad quality coffee just as I do not favor only shade-grown, fair trade. I don’t consider my behavior unethical, selfish or cheap.
“I’ve got a week to cram for my BME 83 final,” Pratt says to Trinity over burgers at the Loop, “When’s your paper due?” “Next Monday,” replies Trinity. Thank God it’s a term paper and not a final exam, thinks Trinity. Or at least, should think. After finals are over, Pratt and Trinity are likely to share a similar bewilderment of not having retained much from their courses. Only for Pratt, it’s cramming for an exam. For Trinity, it’s a protracted term paper completed not by deep sea diving, but by spurts of hydroplaning across the material’s surface. Writing a term paper today could hardly be called advanced learning. But it’s not really our fault either. What denigrates the intellectual rigor of the undergraduate academic paper is the ubiquity of analyzed information available online and the revisions-for-dummies built into today’s word processors. In “Phaedrus,” Plato recounted Socrates’s fear that writing would rob men of their memory. By transferring knowledge in their minds onto paper, men would adopt “the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom,” and “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction.” Although we now know Socrates’s concern is unfounded, there is something to be said about the erosion of our memory. Retaining facts is something of a lost art now, easily substituted by the Internet, with its remarkable capacity to capture some twenty centuries of advanced thought at the click of a mouse. Playwright Richard Foreman laments the loss of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance” in a recent web publication of the British science and technology think tank Edge Foundation, Inc. Alluding to Socrates, he imagines “pancake people,” stretched thin by too much information too readily available in his play “The Gods are Pounding My Head!” Foreman’s “pancake people” may too well refer to the 21st-century man, or college student, as the case may be. One wonders if the process of building a “complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure” of a self-made liberal arts education has become replaced by the convenience of the Internet. We can still construct the cathedral-like structure that Foreman refers to with universally-accessible information on the Web if we are forced to interpret it in new forms. The Internet gives us knowledge—fast. And to quote Sir Francis Bacon via the paraphrased Latin truism, scientia potential est, “knowledge is power.” How we use that knowledge, however, is a different notion altogether. Knowledge, as organic matter, nourishes new growth of something more synthesized, something more commonly known under the Genus Analysis in the college context. Microsoft Word subverts the natural conversion process of that readily available knowledge into new growth. Just imagine how much one can revise information into new shapes, like gluing together pieces into a convincing model of time-earned ideas. The power of word processing is rather astounding when one thinks about how writing used to be done—yes, by hand, in notebooks (gasp!). On the increasingly rare occasion that we encounter such a writer today, like the Turkish Pulitzer Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, the idea astounds us by its novelty. To be clear, I’m not harboring some archaic nostalgia for hand-written term papers. Typing is good if not for its speed, then undoubtedly for its cleanliness and ability to help us streamline our thoughts. After Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing ball, his first typewriter, a friend commented that his writing had become tighter. When we begin to think of ourselves typewriting, the way, say, Cormac McCarthy wrote “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” exclusively on a 1958 Olivetti, it seems laughable to imagine ourselves clacking away in Perkins elbows deep in globs of white-out. That McCarthy could write great American novels without Shift+F7 is enough to make us shake our heads at the whimsy of a world before MS Word’s thesaurus. With SparkNotes and time to revise, students in courses with term papers are less likely to invest in gaining knowledge from the classroom. Seduced by Web shortcuts, they are more likely to stave off readings until days before a paper deadline. In that brief window, they have the luxury to play around with words until information takes the shape of something original. There may be an easy solution: If professors really want to make their students think and cultivate analysis throughout the semester instead of in the last two weeks of finals, they should enforce timed paper exams or hold written exams in class, and increase the importance of class participation during the semester. That would not only save students the agony of learning the history of political thought from 1700 to 1875 in the span of two weeks, it might motivate them to invest more in helping to preserve and contribute to the “dense cultural heritage” we’ve been handed down over the years. Not to mention make us more interesting and insightful. Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. This is her final column of the semester.
Citizens in the fictitious Gotham City rely on Batman to fight crime when the justice system cannot. The legendary archer Robin Hood took his egalitarian convictions to the road by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Although the English hero probably didn’t exist, the romantic notion of a justice-minded outlaw so entranced us that the story of Robin Hood continues to be retold, over and over again.
When it comes to student groups, I have no qualms about having more.
It is hard to be the odd one out. It is even harder to be the odd one out in a place where you already stand out.
The nude female form: What is it about a woman’s body that is so provocative? From the voluptuous to the obese, nude women have attracted attention for centuries.
Three summers ago, on a road trip with friends through Idaho, I spent several days with a family that ran a sprawling cattle feedlot. Early one morning, when all of us were enjoying bacon and talking about mule deer spreads, a silver-tipped old man walked in for breakfast.
Good things come from trusting your instincts. I know it when I am hollering at Egypt score against Italy on a 32-inch TV screen with 100 belligerent Sierra Leonean men. We are thinking nothing and feeling only raw emotion, strong as a bullet, knocking in our guts and in our heads.
After five weeks of living without in rural Sierra Leone, I could hardly contain my anticipation to visit the big city, Freetown, for the weekend. But when I returned back to my humble country roost, I was surprised to find how much I had grown accustomed to the rural life. In Mile 91, I wake to the sound of children's feet pattering inches outside my bedroom wall, not to hollers, car horns and engines. There are no hour-long debates about where to eat dinner, how to get there, through what neighborhood and how to get home. In the provinces, mangoes, rice and hardboiled eggs are my bread and butter, and indecision over choice is never a problem. Here I do not face the frustration of waiting for a spotty Internet connection to deliver tantalizing glimpses of the outside world. I take my baths in the dark with several cups of cool well water, and my reading is done under the supervision of a kerosene lamp or candlestick.
In "Rules for Radicals," Saul Alinsky writes that "he who fears corruption fears life." There is, in fact, no honor in living the life of a moral man.
Since her birth, a worker bee knows what she must do. In the first three days of her life, she cleans out the cell she hatched from. For thirteen days after, she removes the corpses of dead bees and encases invaders like mice in propolis, a sticky resin bees collect from trees. She feeds and cares for developing larvae, and takes out the queen's waste. She retrieves nectar and pollen from field bees and evaporates the water content to begin the honey ripening process. Later she produces beeswax, guards the hive, and by the sixth week, leaves to forage for pollen and nectar until she dies.