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(11/14/16 9:12pm)
Like many, I was shocked by the results of the election last week. The country is incredibly divided and there are various groups of people who face the prospect of policies that threaten their homes, bodily autonomy and safety. While there is uncertainty about whether and in what form these policies will be enacted, the reports of harassment and hate crimes across the country in the past week alone are terrifying. It is unlikely I will be directly affected by most of these policies, but I am fearful for my friends, loved ones and people in general who will be.
(10/27/16 10:58am)
This is an article about the meaning of life. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t simply announce the theme of a piece from the get-go. I would start with a personal anecdote that leads into the theme of the book I’ll be discussing, and then return to what I took away from the book. In this case, I might talk about seeing a tiny sick mouse sitting motionless in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, coming home to my dog who is now so old she no longer greets me or the death of an acquaintance, and the effect or lack thereof these things had on me. But I think we live at a time where the question of the meaning of life is so frequently mentioned, and so infrequently engaged with seriously, that talking about it almost necessarily invokes clichés and attempts to address the question with personal anecdotes that come off as self-important. And further, rigorous interrogation of the subject often ends with people stubbornly adhering to their intuitions about it or embracing nihilism. Consequently, I think it’s extremely hard for authors to write about the meaning of life in an original and effective way. In “The Principles of Uncertainty”, author and illustrator Maira Kalman succeeds in doing this. While she doesn’t claim to answer existential questions, she portrays this feeling of uncertainty in a simple and profound way.
(10/06/16 10:00am)
I think for most of us, when we think back to high school, a big thing we think about is our aesthetic sensibilities. Many of us will have a very specific memory of listening to a certain song, watching a certain movie or show, reading a particular book or an especially embarrassing fashion choice. For me it’s listening to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac while driving to school in the early fall on one of those hazy, greenish days, where it’s somehow both humid and cool, and you imagine a tornado is on its way. It’s watching all five seasons of “Six Feet Under” on rented DVDs when I was out sick from school before winter break. It’s reading “A Confederacy of Dunces” while riding a stationary bike and having to stop pedaling for several minutes because I was laughing. And regrettably, it’s choosing to wear a fedora while protesting Act 10 at the Capitol, which makes me identifiable in a few photos of the crowded rotunda that were published in newspapers and books.
(09/22/16 12:00pm)
Last fall, I took the semester off due to increasingly serious depression. While I planned on doing something productive to help me recover, my days usually consisted of sleeping until 3 p.m., not getting out of bed until 5 p.m., drinking excessive amounts of pre-made iced coffee with added protein as if by being extra alert (read: anxious and jittery), I could make up for my oversleeping, and contemplating my myriad of problems until around 2 a.m., when I would drive to the 24-hour Woodman’s on the other side of town to replace my empty carton of iced coffee. Once at Woodman’s, I’d circle the whole store a few times with a cart containing two or three items, avoiding the gaze of the people stocking the shelves while wondering what they thought of me. And of course, being the self-absorbed writer-type, I spent much of the time thinking about how I would turn this experience into a story (this isn’t it). I’d imagine myself telling the story, but also telling people about imagining myself telling the story, until there was an endless regress of telling and imagining. Self-awareness is in, I thought.
(09/06/16 10:00am)
This past summer I took a creative writing class, during which my professor told us that fiction about college is often unsuccessful because publishers and audiences often regard college experiences as somewhat childish or ordinary. Everyone gets their heart broken, everyone experiences the fear and thrill that comes with newfound independence, everyone changes and grows when surrounded by new and different people and ideas and everyone (more or less) makes it out on the other side, or so the thinking goes.
(04/25/14 3:16am)
This weekend, the South Asian Sisters-Madison, a student organization of progressive South Asian women, will be presenting their sixth production of "Yoni Ki Baat." I had the opportunity to sit down with a cast member, sophomore Nita Sharma, to talk about the show.
(04/23/14 3:10am)
April 19, slam poetry duo Climbing PoeTree gave a stellar performance in the Northwoods room of Union South. Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, who make up the group, integrated spoken word, hip-hop played on traditional instruments and multimedia presentations throughout their show. The pieces centered around environmental, racial, class-based and gender-based oppressions.
(04/18/14 1:01am)
On Saturday, spoken word duo Climbing PoeTree will be performing at Union South in the Northwoods Room at 7pm. The group consists of Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, whose performances interweave spoken word, hip-hop, and multimedia theater. Climbing PoeTree focuses on shedding light on injustice and oppression and using our hopes to create a vision of a better future.
(04/14/14 2:52am)
In 2000, the United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a set of eight humanitarian missions to be completed by 2015. The goals included eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality, reduction of child mortality rates, improvement of maternal health, combatting diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability and the creation of a global partnership for development. Each of the goals was also set with specific numerical milestones to track the project.
(03/24/14 3:18am)
Last summer, I enrolled in a philosophy course here at University of Wisconsin-Madison entitled “Contemporary Moral Issues.” The course, as its name suggests, involved students reading academic papers about rational arguments for the ethical permissibility or unacceptability of a number of policies, such as capital punishment, abortion, voluntary active euthanasia and the consumption of meat produced by factory farms. I came into the class with fairly strong beliefs about most of the subjects, with little expectation of having my mind changed.
(03/05/14 5:45am)
Cheryl Strayed’s best seller “Wild” chronicles her journey as a young woman on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and how the trip helped her find herself during a time of great difficulty in her life. But that’s not all she has to offer. “Tiny Beautiful Things” is a collection of anonymous advice columns that Strayed wrote for the website TheRumpus.net under the penname “Dear Sugar.” Additionally, her novel “Torch” tells the story of a family coping with grief after loss.