Viewpoint

Winter break isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even though I planned to read as many Haruki Murakami novels as possible and learn to sew and teach myself to play the harmonica and write stories and make crafty things, I just ended up eating cookies, watching Twin Peaks, listening to weird ambient music, and sleeping more than I have in years. Maybe I wasted my time. Alright, I definitely wasted my time. Honestly though, I’m totally okay with that.Read more...

Recently, my sister mentioned that I don’t respond to her texts until an hour or two after she sends them. “Probably because it’s a hipster thing to do,” she said. Hipster. That overused yet inevitable term. Even after a year of working for the Dec, I’m still not entirely sure how to best describe what we do.Read more...

My father always used to say that as a person in a position of power, you have the ability to delegate authority, but not responsibility. This week Joe Paterno found out the truth in that adage, admittedly the hard way. Paterno is 84 years old, and has been the head football coach at Penn State University for a staggering 46 years, by far the longest tenure of any football coach at any college. He is inextricably linked with Penn State’s mostly successful program and is absolutely iconic within college football and sports in general, synonymous with longevity and class as a competitor.Read more...

Most of the titillating entertainment news pervading your social media and the blogosphere this week centers around the announcement that Kim Kardashian and her husband of just 72 days, lackluster NBA forward Kris Humphries, are getting a divorce. I loathe the thought of dwelling on those publicity whores and their sham of a marriage, so I will only include the facts that they spent ten million dollars on their wedding, one of the most highly publicized events of the year, and couldn’t even keep it together for a whole three months.Read more...

It’s likely that you’ve heard of Invisible Children somewhere along the line. They’re a group of vibrant twenty-something’s who might have visited your high school to talk about that one war going on in Africa. They probably showed you some high definition short films of kidnapped children turned into child soldiers, and you might have even been handed a glossy leaflet or two about the devastation of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or whatever it’s called.Read more...

If you have not yet heard of the Occupy Wall Street protests going on in New York City or the dozens of other similar movements united across the country under the “Occupy” header, you might want to conisder moving out of that rock you’ve been living under. Starting in mid-September, fed up youths decided to exercise their own civil liberties and send a message to the richest corporations and executives that hold sway over the political and media mood in this country.Read more...

By the time this hits newsstands, the State of Georgia will have executed Troy Davis for murdering an off-duty police officer in 1989. The prosecution presented no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime, relying instead on eyewitness testimony to garner a grand jury conviction. In the years following the trial, seven of the nine witnesses recanted their own statements in court, saying that they had been under tremendous police pressure, including forceful coercion, to testify falsely against Davis.Read more...

I certainly won’t be the first person to welcome you (back) to the University of Virginia. By the time you read this you’ve undoubtedly begun to settle in to whatever routine allows you to cope with the constantly battling elements of class, sleep, and a social life. I’m sure you’ve heard that college is supposed to be the best four years of your life by now, and while this may not be true for everyone, it will certainly be the fastest. Every semester goes by quicker than the last, and eventually find yourself confusing events that happened years apart.Read more...

There are an awful lot of stu-dents at this school who readily believe every stigma popularly attached to all manners of illicit drugs. Weed makes you lazy and stupid, cocaine makes people annoying and violent, acid will make you go crazy, and nobody does heroin because everyone is afraid of needles. While a lot of these are rooted in fact, I rather frequently see these same students throw any preconceived notions they have about “drugs” out the window when confronted with a seemingly overwhelming amount of schoolwork.Read more...