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(07/01/11 8:00am)
Whether you’re an incoming freshman, looking forward to the beginning of “the best four years of your life” and wondering what it will hold—lots of pseudo-profound talks with people you won’t be friends with a year later, probably—or a rising senior like me, devoting day, night, arm and leg to a job search that is drawing ever nearer, summer is typically not a time for reflection. That’s what the end of the year, when sorority girls say their long teary goodbyes to people they barely know (so long as they’re not those former freshman year friends) is for.
(07/01/11 8:00am)
After a gala reception at Hanes Art Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last month, the local chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom held an advance screening of The Whistleblower, a based-on-a-true-story film due out in August about a U.N. sex trafficking scandal in post-war Bosnia.
(04/15/11 9:00am)
Earlier this week, famous author Salman Rushdie spoke at Page Auditorium. The writer, who has published over a dozen books, won the 1981 Booker Prize and was accepted into the exclusive American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008. He is perhaps most widely recognized, however, for the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. Published in 1988, the novel earned him not only a profusion of protests from the Muslim community, but a price on his head to boot.
(04/08/11 9:00am)
There is, perhaps, no time more fondly remembered for me than that of America in the 1920s, when wealth was there for the taking, jazz was the sound of the times, and Prohibition was making millions for the men we now call bootleggers.
(03/31/11 9:00am)
In 1953, a boy named Roberto Bolaño was brought into the world, born to a Chilean truck driver and a schoolteacher. Bolaño was, by all accounts, not the stuff of legends. Scrawny and small, he spent his early and adolescent years as an outcast and a punching bag until slowly he came to prefer his private bookishness to the more normal hobbies of other Chilean schoolchildren. Finally, in 1968, he dropped out altogether and left his native Santiago with his family to pursue a future in Mexico City.
(03/25/11 9:42am)
In 2004, Google publicized plans to work with universities and public libraries in an attempt to create the world’s largest digital book and journal archive. The project, which eventually came to be known as Google Books, grew at some point into an endeavor to, in the company’s words, “democratize knowledge” by digitizing every unique book on the planet—all 129,864,880 of them, according to the company’s own calculations.
(03/18/11 9:00am)
Across the nation, states are struggling through economic woes that have left them with enormous budgetary deficits. As a result, a number of state governments have sought to raise capital by implementing certain strategic measures. Two months ago, for example, North Carolina considered privatizing its state-operated Alcohol Beverage Control system to raise approximately $300 million. Although that approach didn’t come to pass in North Carolina and didn’t catch on around the country, some states have taken warmly to another idea—enacting legislation that would require web behemoth Amazon.com to start collecting state taxes on sales to residents.
(03/04/11 10:55am)
A couple of weeks ago, oil giant Chevron was deemed liable for rainforest pollution in the South American country of Ecuador. The finding was handed down by a local judge, who is holding the company responsible for $8.6 billion in damages and an additional 10 percent reparation fee. The most interesting part of this story? The judge gave Chevron just over two weeks to issue a formal apology for the pollution, at which point the amount the company owed would double.
(02/18/11 11:00am)
Although my generation has never been able to classify the Middle East as a stable region, the past couple of months have brought more volatility than even any of us are used to. The collapse of the Tunisian regime on January 14th quickly gave way to the abdication of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last Friday, and the unrest has now spread to Yemen, Libya, Iran, Bahrain and Iraq, where different kinds of disgruntled peoples are clashing with the police and causing problems for those in charge. These uprisings are not alike in every way, since each nation has its own set of dissidents with specific, historically based motivations, but there are still some striking similarities.
(02/11/11 11:13am)
At this point, most Americans are at least somewhat aware of the Egyptian uprising that has occurred over the past few weeks. That’s not to say that everyone understands it, though, and it seems that many might still be confused as to exactly what’s going on and who precipitated the situation. The political pundits don’t help clear anything up either, especially not when they persist with their claims that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are the chief orchestrators of the movement.
(02/04/11 11:08am)
For the past week and a half, the world has had its eyes on Egypt. The political unrest there has held the focus of news networks across the globe and maintained its place on the front pages of newspapers. By now, mere news reports have been joined by a multitude of op-ed pieces; live blogs have shifted the conversation into the present tense; and Glenn Beck has made an appearance on the O’Reilly Factor because apparently one of them at a time just doesn’t suffice. If live coverage is what you’re after, however, your best bet is probably Twitter.
(01/28/11 11:00am)
The American system of higher education, it seems, is in danger of under-serving its respective student bodies, or so the litany of charges leveled against it would have you believe. In recent months, a number of findings have been cast against the general performance of college students in America, including the equally unsettling notions that students spend 75 percent of their time sleeping and socializing and that the average time spent studying has decreased from 40 hours a week in 1961 to 27 hours a week in 2003.
(01/21/11 11:00am)
It seems that every time something pertaining to the social and sexual exploits of members of the Duke student body goes awry, the same alleged conundrum is bound to surface somewhere. How is it, parents and administrators alike ask, that the students here, some of the most intelligent and soon-to-be influential in the world, can possibly behave in the way that they do?
(01/14/11 11:00am)
On Wednesday, the year-old unity government of the nation of Lebanon collapsed, as 11 of its 30 cabinet members resigned in protest of Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s cooperation with the U.N.-backed international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of his father. The tribunal is expected to issue indictments, which will likely include members of Hezbollah, a political party with alleged terrorist ties, in the near future, the anticipation of which has been the root of growing tension in the nation for some time now.
(12/10/10 11:24pm)
Tuesday, English majors at Duke received an e-mail from the department alerting them as to the existence of a website directed toward “aspiring authors and aspiring Italians.” The site, writersmafia.wordpress.com, is run by a man who refers to himself only as the Don, and who posts daily links to writing contests, calls for publication submissions and, once a week, reveals the contact information for the ever elusive query-seeking agent. The e-mail noted, quite rightly, that this website would be of particular use to creative writers.
(12/03/10 11:00am)
Thanksgiving has come and gone and, as we move now into December, the holiday season is upon us with all that it bears in tow: exams, shopping, travel and, for one particular stretch of highway in New Jersey, religious dispute.
(11/19/10 10:44am)
Last Wednesday, London students rioted in response to the English government’s proposals to cut spending on education. A protest outside of the Conservative Party headquarters descended into chaos, and the steps of Parliament found themselves steeped in resistance as well. Over 50,000 citizens from all over the country gathered to show their distaste for the reforms, which would allow English universities to hike the price of tuition to between two- and four-fold its current cost.
(11/12/10 11:00am)
Last year, Congress passed a law that granted the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products. It was required, under that same law, that cigarette companies dedicate half of the surface area of each pack of cigarettes to graphic reminders of the dangers of smoking.
(11/05/10 9:03am)
As registration rolls around and the process of schedule crafting begins again, it’s easy to be reminded of the advice that many of us may have received from teachers, parents and speakers upon graduation from high school. At that time, when it seemed that everyone fancied themselves experts on the matter, it was not at all rare to encounter the sort of sidewalk philosopher who cautioned against any sort of pre-professionalism, and recommended instead a course load conceived with an open mind, and with plenty of time left for meeting people and “getting involved around campus,” whatever that may mean.
(10/29/10 9:00am)
The book, it seems, is trending down. Recent years have marked a decline in sales for almost all genres, a rare exception being the 6.9 percent jump in adult hardcovers in 2009. (This, however, is less characteristic of widespread genre success and more an indicator of Dan Brown’s rampant, though to some debatably ill-founded, popularity among the masses.) In fact, the only side of the industry that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds is, predictably, the e-book, whose sales on Amazon.com dwarfed even hardcovers, the company revealed in July.
