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Michel de Montaigne is widely considered to be the first modern essayist. “The Essais,” which in Middle French means “attempts” or “trials,” were the products of Montaigne’s sometimes messy ruminations. He freely admitted these were abundant with inconsistencies and contradictions. However, now compiled in books well over 1,000 pages long, “The Essais” is one of the most significant contributions to Western thought.
As a volunteer for Dartmouth’s First-Year Trips program, I would often joke with co-volunteers that Trips runs like a well-oiled machine. A million logistical nightmares are averted by tightly adhering to daily schedules and deferring to time-honored protocol. Many upperclassmen look fondly on the traditions that the ’21s have just been indoctrinated into: Being greeted in Hanover by students in bewildering outfits, dancing to “Everytime We Touch,” enjoying Annie’s macaroni and cheese and laughing at the antics of Dr. Schlitz in “Schlitz on Mount Washington” after a warm meal at the “Lodj.”
Wherever you stand on the ideological spectrum, it is hard to deny the fact that things in the White House are not quite running like “a fine-tuned machine,” as President Trump recently tweeted they were. The reason why Trump’s supporters continue to make this denial is not just because they have a different moral framework, conflicting policy priorities or even because they have a lower level of education, as many self-entitled liberals love to contend. Rather, the Left has shown an inability to criticize Trump in a meaningful way. Their sarcastic laughter and self-righteousness have failed, just like the Trump regime has. Before we keep pointing fingers, we need to establish what we really want from a President, what actually makes a good leader and how Trump has so far proved an undeniably unsuccessful one.
I walk into the meditation room in the basement of the Tucker Center. The monk in charge greets me and invites me to join his prayer circle. For a few moments, the monk, my peers and I walk in a circle with our heads bowed, having come together to participate in a club that both engages in meditation and studies the core concepts associated with Zen Buddhism. We fall into deep contemplation. The room is silent.
I have never felt unsafe on this campus. The weathered buildings straight out of the 18th century, the scenic mountain views and the vivid blades of grass on the Green never posed a threat to me. This space has always been a space of beauty, of quiet comfort, of deep self-reflection. It has always been a space of security. Until now.
“A sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication make up the humdrum backdrop against which our ideals and euphorias oft stand out...” In “Black Sun,” Julia Kristeva connected the euphoric sublime to Sigmund Freud’s notion of melancholia, elaborating upon two theories to understand how our environment and the people around us translate into effects immortalized in our memories. Sublimity was first defined by Immanuel Kant and later Edmund Burke as the greatness of man and co-opted by gothic and romantic writers to evoke grandeur and joyous exaltation of emotions in towering gothic mountains and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s scenes of nature. In contrast, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” describes melancholia as a depressive effect that occurs due to an irreconcilable loss. By intertwining the melancholy with the sublime, Kristeva demonstrated the complexity of various aesthetic experiences, whether it be in the case of art or social interactions.
At this point in the year — between post-midterms fatigue and pre-finals stress — it isn’t uncommon to become disenchanted with the notions of hard work and success so often emphasized at Dartmouth. With an administration in turmoil, a monopolistic dining system, a flawed housing system and an undeniable pattern of elitism and racial discrimination in faculty hiring and retention, it can be incredibly easy to focus on Dartmouth’s problems.
Two weeks ago my heart beat louder and more painfully than the screeches of the U-Bahn metro as it came to a halt. Eight weeks ago I arrived in Berlin, Germany for my language study abroad program. Three days ago an explosion at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England claimed innocent lives. Two weeks ago my U-Bahn stopped, and a man five seats away started screaming in Arabic.
Stanford University researcher Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Experiment” has become a classic child psychology test. A group of 3- to 5-year-old children were given a choice between eating a marshmallow immediately upon receiving it or waiting 15 minutes and being rewarded with a second one. About 30 percent of children succeeded in delaying gratification, and years later, those children were found to be more socially and academically successful. The low-delayers were more likely to have higher body mass indices, addiction problems and an overall lower rate of success.
The moment I pressed the red "x" button, relief and dread washed over me. For the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to delete any social media apps from my phone. The “Fear of Missing Out” syndrome always stopped me — what if I missed something important or one of my friends did something that I needed to know about? How would I stay up to date on the latest news happening around the world and on campus? I was conscious of the fact that I spent, or rather wasted, too much time on social media, but I refused to take the first step to address this issue. The breaking point finally came a few weeks ago. I just had enough.
President Donald Trump left Washington last week for his first international trip as commander in chief. He will be addressing members of all three of the world’s Abrahamic religions during stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican. On Saturday, May 20 he arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and met with Saudi King Salman and a variety of members of the royal family and government.
The two terms I took creative classes at Dartmouth stand apart in my memory. They were in the spring and summer terms, and the nice weather played a part in my heightened sense of well-being. But there was something stress-relieving about being graded for creating as opposed to analyzing. Instead of answering questions, I was exploring their meanings. One assignment asked that I write about a problem from a friend’s perspective. I ended up writing a cathartic short story where I articulated my homesickness for Singapore and high school.
In early March, the entire Dartmouth community was emailed an invitation from the College president’s office to participate in “Inside Dartmouth’s Budget,” a five-session lecture series on higher education finance at the College. The email advertised the program as a chance to “unpack Dartmouth’s budget by exploring our revenue and expenditures in the context of national trends and external forces that impact higher education.” Intrigued, I signed up and was randomly selected to participate.
“The causes of death were family, finances and fatigue. The tasteful tombstone is set amid the soothing green of a field of Perrier bottles,” wrote Time magazine in an “obituary” of the yuppie. The year of death: 1991.
In 1944, one year before the end of World War II, the British Special Operations Executive — a secret wing of the British military formed for the purposes of espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines — devised a plan to kill Adolf Hitler. In its design, a German-speaking marksman fluent in the dialect of the Bavarian district of Berchtesgadener Land would parachute in and assassinate Hitler from afar as he walked to his morning tea at the Berghof, his Alpine retreat in Bavaria, Germany. Using information provided by one of Hitler’s personal guards, captured at Normandy on D-Day, plans were drawn up for Operation Foxley, which would be the third attempted execution of the Fuhrer. But those plans, and the operation, were never realized.
When you hear about algorithms — like the one Facebook uses to construct your personal newsfeed or the one Google is fine-tuning to fight the spread of fake news — it’s likely that you’re hearing about predictive analytics. An algorithm is just a series of instructions: Multiply the two, carry the three or go to class at these three times every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Predictive analytics, as the name might imply, are algorithms meant to collect and use data to generate a prediction about an outcome that cannot be definitively known until the event occurs. Based on what you know, is a given person going to make it to class? If it’s Green Key Friday, then that probability might go down.
When I leave Streeter Hall every morning, I am usually too distracted to notice my surroundings, but last weekend I felt unsettled after registering that my daily route is adjacent to a cemetery. There is nothing particularly odd about the cemetery itself, but its integration into campus feels unusual. What bothered me about the cemetery was not that it was there, that it lacked a border or the feeling of encroachment on a spiritual space, but rather what its vicinity symbolized about Dartmouth.
If French president-elect Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election can be called a landslide, then the column inches hyperbolically trumpeting it as the wholesale rejection of global populism can rightly be called a tsunami. The authors of a Washington Post piece on the election couch the French people’s decision in mythological terms, saying that “France ... shrugged off the siren call of right-wing populism.” CNN asserts, in heroic language, that Macron defeated populism in the “great political battle between globalism and nationalism that is underway in Western democracies.” The Huffington Post calls Macron’s victory “somewhat comparable to Napoleon Bonaparte.”
I don’t have Netflix. Therefore, whenever my friends discuss “13 Reasons Why,” I can only sit and listen. From the information that I’ve gathered, this show vividly illustrates — rather dangerously — the hyper-judgmental environment that many of us lived through in high school. As much as we attempt to overcome the peer pressure surrounding how we speak, act, dress and exist, many fail to do so. “13 Reasons Why” did not catch my attention because of its accurate portrayal of high school or shock-value; it caught my attention because of its stark contrast to Dartmouth’s culture of embracing embarrassment.
When French president-elect Emmanuel Macron’s victory in Sunday’s election was announced, my first reaction was a breath of relief. My second was an inane little voice inside my head whispering, “Oh, no. It’s still just us.” The fact that Front National candidate Marine Le Pen failed in France — and by a wide margin — while President Donald Trump succeeded in the United States gives us one less excuse for our now cartoonish image on the world stage.