Each Thursday afternoon this past month, I’ve attended a lecture on ice-ocean interaction, each led by an expert in the field. The talks, held at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), are part of a course in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and are open to all members of the community, including college interns like myself. The experience of attending these talks is kind of like how I imagine it must feel to stand on a piece of ice in the warming Arctic.
On Monday, the Student Government Association (SGA) held a town hall to hear opinions from the student body on five referenda under consideration. Among the submitted referenda was a proposal from Students Against Institutional Discrimination (SAID) to initiate a democratic redrafting of the SGA Constitution to make the group more responsive to the student body. The referendum proposal is supported by a broad coalition of student organizations who have been frustrated for years by the Association’s structural flaws, which prevent representatives from being accountable to their constituents.
Last Friday, a judge refused to grant a motion filed by pop star Kesha Sebert seeking temporary release from her contract with a man she says raped her.
CNN and other mainstream media sources have strongly implied, and sometimes outright stated, Sanders can’t win. The myth that Sanders is unelectable has been popular for the entirety of his campaign, despite its disconnect from reality.
“When I was in seventh grade, a black kid in my English class told me I was black on the outside but white on the inside because I talked like a white kid. I told that kid that ‘if black people aren’t allowed to speak standard American English, I have no interest in being black, so that works out, doesn’t it?’”
Take a moment to think about the ocean. Not the water at the beach you wade into on hot days, but the deep, far-reaching ocean. Now think about what you’d see if you dove 10,000 feet under. Do you have an idea of what you might find in the depths of the ocean, a picture in your mind that you can attest is fairly accurate? Probably not – and many scientists don’t either.
Sunday’s Super Bowl, a hard-fought 24-10 victory for the Denver Broncos, was, by many accounts, not the most compelling football game in recent memory. Aside from mediocre play, the event was dominated by its halftime show. An aging Coldplay, peddling a multicolored message of peace, dusted off a collection of classics; Super Bowl regular Bruno Mars delivered a rendition of his hit “Uptown Funk;” and Beyoncé, leading a crew of backup dancers whose movements and clothing alternately evoked Michael Jackson and Malcolm X, performed an ode to blackness in “Formation,” a song whose politically charged music video had debuted 24 hours earlier.
After the New Hampshire primary, the Republican Party has successfully declared its frontrunners. A loud, obnoxious xenophobe and misogynist in Donald Trump. A quieter, more evangelical, equally obnoxious xenophobe and misogynist in Ted Cruz. Behind them Marco Rubio, the “moderate” and “establishment” Republican who is apparently really upset that Barack Obama is trying to make us more like the rest of the world, because being the nation with the highest amount of wealth inequality and the highest incarceration rate is something to be proud of. There’s also some guy who is, I guess, the governor of Ohio, and whose entire second-place speech in New Hampshire was some weird personal recollection in which he gave no indication of what policies he supports. But for all these candidates, attacks against Planned Parenthood, Mexicans and Muslims have become ways to score points. Two-thirds of voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary wanted to ban Muslims from entering the US – proving, as if we needed any more evidence, that the Republican Party is a national embarrassment.
The old model of our country’s penal system put heavy emphasis on punishment. Newer models of this system claim to place a greater importance on rehabilitation, yet they often fall short of achieving this goal. While swift justice and fair punishment are necessary and important for those who commit crimes, oftentimes, the punishment actually further disrupts the individual’s life and predisposes them to commit another crime.
