OPINION
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COLUMNS
Arboreal apologetics
By Mihir Bellamkonda | January 29, 2018I think I’m going to talk to you about trees for a while.
I think I’m going to talk to you about trees for a while.
The Chronicle got the inside scoop on these massively athletic 17 year olds’ decisions to play for Duke. Turns out, the factor that sealed the deal is surprisingly obvious. When asked why he chose Duke, Williamson answered, “Oh easy. The grass. The impeccably kept lawn.”
Greek life has personally helped me grow intellectually, spiritually and as a citizen of the Duke community.
In an ideal world, I would have rushed sororities. One of the personal characteristics that I pride myself on is being able to become friends with almost anyone.
In the era of fake news and partisan mistruths, fine-tuning the direction of our moral compasses is an experience we should wholeheartedly engage in.
The humanities extend other ways for digesting the beauty and horror that comprises every human’s short stint on earth. STEM is a very necessary part of our society, but the humanities deserve equal weight. When America is so entrenched in furthering technology at the sake of entire worldviews, it is evident that such areas of study and work are not currently as valued as science and math are.
I have written about President Trump’s pathological lying. While there is not an equivalence between Trump’s untruths and Sanders’ oversimplifications, both signify the troubling popularity of demagogues who offer facile and unrealistic solutions to complex problems and disregard inconvenient truths.
Welcome to Trump’s America, Year One: where the inconceivable is commonplace and the unconscionable is government business.
As of his latest edition, Cook intends to initially say one word every five minutes but will actually update the speech on-the-fly as he delivers it, slowing it down even more to an agonising crawl of one word every thirty minutes.
We blew our chance in 2016 and saw the consequences in 2017. May we fight back stronger than ever in 2018.
I am one generation removed from poverty. The patriarchal gender roles that define women as assets kept by patriarchs with several wives, each to produce children who are seemingly destined to an impoverished life, still creep at my ankles.
SLGs represent an important part of the college experience and the transition toward a residential college system would lead to less fulfilling college experiences for those in SLG life. It would not necessitate more fulfilling college experiences for independents. Amongst the panel, there was a consensus: every Duke student, regardless of affiliation or lack thereof, wants to find a sense of community.
When activities no longer feel like conscious decisions, when the agency you originally exerted to begin them in the first place is gone, the enjoyment goes with them. There is a constant pressure at Duke to avoid free time and to make your day as obligatory as possible. But where exactly is the pleasure in that?
Duke’s somewhat limiting social scene has been among the hardest of adjustments to make for these displaced students. “Clubs in London always had musical guests, and they wouldn’t make people pay for tickets, so the cover charge would stay the same even when we went to go see Diplo, Travis Scott, Akon or Jason Derulo,” Carolina said. “Maybe they cleaned the saddle on the Shooters bull since we’ve been gone?”
This is a plea to acknowledge that there is often a direct tradeoff between diversity and comfort, a plea that deeply authentic relationships exist at this campus, even if it may not seem that way on the surface.
Any reasonable reader will walk away from the book concluding that its authors believe the president suffers from the psychiatric deficiencies they describe in their respective chapters. Its authors’ formula clearly diverges from the overarching spirit of the Goldwater Rule, which seeks to avoid public hysteria by demanding that such weighty accusations be supported by an actual examination rather than armchair psychiatry from the sidelines.
While ‘progressive’ fraternity parties are thankfully a thing of the past at Duke, the mindset that accompanied them is not.
Every toothbrush I touch becomes electric. Halloween is named after me. I used a number 4 pencil on the SATs and got a 1570. Elon Musk is my fairy godmother.
Nugget: Right let’s get a few things straight—I didn’t serve two tours in Afghanistan so that I could be harassed and used on a daily basis for some pathetic student’s social media capital—
The jail sits a mile from Duke University and just across the street from the gleaming glass of the Durham Performing Arts Center.