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People (I assume) are always wondering “How can we make Duke marginally better?” To them I say simply, “Fix parking.” They might respond by saying “But, John, parking here is such an ill-conceived atrocious mess, that short of well-meaning carpool initiatives or a complete redesign of the campus, how can we even begin to fix it?” And they have a point. But I know where to begin.
A strange feeling came over me as I watched the inauguration this afternoon: a weird sense of being pleased by the outcome of a political event. As modern college students, we are contractually obliged to be cynical and jaded, detached and ironic. But for a small gap of time I didn’t feel any of that. It didn’t really have anything to do anything President Barack Obama said (not that his speech wasn’t good, just that it was what we’ve come to expect from him). It was the sense of actually having respect for a political leader, of being kind of (as pathetic as this sounds) in awe of someone I was “supposed” to be in awe of.
I would like to follow up on my Oct. 22 anti-voting column “Please don’t vote” and do my best to clarify my position:
Imagine, for a minute, that you are a Chronicle columnist.
Two weeks ago Frank Warren-founder of the Post Secret project and part of the inspiration for the Duke Unmasked campaign-spoke in Page Auditorium about the power of secrets. After he finished, a parade of my fellow students went to the microphone to confess their deepest, darkest secrets to an audience of mostly strangers. As I listened to these students take off their proverbial "masks," I wanted to feel compassion and sympathy for their revelations. Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but all I could think to myself was: "This is pathetic. There is something very, very pathetic about this."
Like flies to wanton boys are we to Residence Life and Housing Services. They toy with us for sport." I think Shakespeare said something like that.
I'm hungry. What should I eat?
The beginning of Spring semester brings many things (although, ironically, not spring): new classes, K-ville, summer planning, the announcement of a disappointing LDOC lineup, etc. Perhaps the most important event come January is the onset of fraternity and sorority rush.
At some point after a semester ends, I log on to ACES to check my grades. I have to be careful about my timing, though: If I check too soon after the semester ends, then I seem obsessive, but if I wait too long to check, it looks like I'm hiding something.
Is Duke good?
In Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, "White Noise," two characters visit a tourist attraction billed as "The Most Photographed Barn in America." Once there, one of them declares, "No one sees the barn... once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." In other words, when confronted with the now-omnipresent images of advertising and popular culture, it becomes impossible to tell which of your emotions are genuine and which are contrived.
The day after the election a friend of mine posed this question to me: "So, are we living in the post-racist era?" He was (mostly) kidding.
Ah, the day courses go online. Is there a better day at Duke? Even the awful new ACES cannot purge that day of its hopeful idealism. Every class seems great when you are registering-when you don't have to deal with professors, exams, TAs, term papers or other students. Every class will be perfect, with no digressions or busy work. You can set your schedule so you never have to wake up before 11, so you have a four-day weekend or so you have no finals. Your next semester can be both intellectually rewarding and relatively undemanding.
I mean it. Just don't vote.
If you could take a pill that would make you 10 percent stupider but would make you appear 20 percent smarter, would you take it? Is the ability to pretend you know something more valuable than your ability to actually know it? That's the question posed by Chuck Klosterman in his last book.
Nothing."
Toward the end of my nine hour drive down to Duke a few weeks ago, while trying to find a North Carolina radio station that wasn't playing that godforsaken Metro Station song, the traffic on I-85 slowed practically to a crawl. Apparently construction on I-85 North had forced opposing traffic to take up one of the lanes on my side, leaving just one lane for me and my fellow southbound travelers. Having already traversed the New Jersey Turnpike and the Beltway, I was in no mood for another traffic jam-Man, I appreciate North Carolina's commitment to long-term improvements, I thought, but this is really annoying. I'd almost rather be listening to "Shake It."
Congratulations! You are lucky enough to have the honor of reading my very first column for The Chronicle. You'll probably be telling your kids about this someday.
Josh McRoberts may have stepped onto the court in Cameron Indoor Stadium for the last time as a player, but he isn't quite done stepping into the classroom as a student.
Early in the first half of Georgia Tech's 84-77 upset of North Carolina last week, the Tar Heels led 14-9 when Yellow Jacket freshman Thaddeus Young hit a three-pointer to cut the deficit to two.
