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The racism I experienced was delicate and fragile; it took the form of a seemingly harmless whisper that faintly irked me, just enough to unsettle me.
“Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who?” They always ask who let the dogs out, but not who takes care of the dogs. Well the answer for both, at least for Durham, is the Animal Protection Society.
I call it homesickness, because surely if there's a name then there's a way.
Likewise, in New York, those who do not know nor wish to know the experiences of Chinese in America are the ones who will stride right past its doors on Centre Street.
We might be better off fixing the conditions which made someone break the rules, rather than wasting energy punishing them for it.
My friends here are all in the same boat. Due to work and extracurriculars, we see each other less and the time we do spend together is mostly spent mitigating each other’s respective mental breakdowns.
At school the learning process is much more formulaic. Attend lecture, do your homework. Study with practice problems, go to office hours for extra help. Unfortunately, there’s no textbook for how to handle sticky (or rather, juicy) situations in the workplace.
This is a love story. I know the best part is yet to come.
The notion of “playing hard” every night is perplexing as an outsider: it’s an activity caught in a dissidence of employing and neglecting empathy.
How many more little moments have we all missed when we choose to listen to music instead of interact?
I don’t mean that we should pretend not to know anything about this campus and act surprised every time we encounter it. But in a very real way, this campus remains a total mystery to us.
Once we forget how abnormal our treatment of women is, the less likely we are to change it.
In a place as diverse as Duke, each and every individual is a cultural onion like no other. I cannot wait to uncover the stories they have to tell as I peel the layers of their identities over the next four years.
Now that my tennis days are well behind me, “put the ball in the other person’s court” is not a literal command screeched by an upset tennis coach, but a metaphorical lesson I preach to my friends like a sophomore frat boy preaches the rules of Thursday night partying to first years.
We shouldn't only learn declarative knowledge and how to think about concepts, but also how to think for ourselves—something that, paradoxically, must be learned but cannot be taught.
If you care and your goal is to make the most impact possible, you don’t need Peter Singer telling you what to do. The philosophy that being rich will allow you to help the most people absolutely isn’t true, especially if you hurt a lot of people in the process of accumulating that wealth.
Confronting the fact that I went to Duke for four years and tried very few off-campus restaurants made me feel a little like a fraud.
The built environment generates stories, and the stories attach flesh to stage, script, choreography, actors, performances, and reviews. Three intentions and three actions, three forms and three interactions of content — all six a standard set to understand design at Duke.
Upon taking the first bite of the sandwich, my tongue was assaulted by an acrid tanginess that instantly overwhelmed any other flavor. Worse, the texture was that of wet rubber: chewy and fibrous, yet unnervingly moist and slippery. Another ingredient was present, and there was more of it than even the avocado that was crucial to the name of the sandwich. Once again, Duke Dining had tricked me into eating something with tomato.
Maybe someday I will enter, not as a student seeking help but as a volunteer.