The opinions presented below are solely the views of the author and do not represent the views of The News-Letter. If you are a member of the Hopkins community looking to submit a piece or a letter to the editor, please email opinions@jhunewsletter.com.
This past August, 80 children in the town of Jubbet ad-Dhib arrived to their first day of school to find their classrooms gone. Concrete slabs sat in the place where, the evening before, six trailers stood with whiteboards, pens, papers and books awaiting the students and their teachers. Undeterred, or perhaps without any other options, the children began to study in the hot August sun before the school set up a tent large enough for most of the children.
About once a year, the fraternity debate is reignited at Hopkins, and the same arguments are trotted out. Fraternities are good, look at the brotherhood; fraternities are misguided, they need Bystander Intervention Training (BIT); fraternities are neutral parties, the problem is alcohol. People avoid condemning fraternities as a whole institution. The administration does not want to anger a large portion of the student body, and non-affiliated students don’t want to face the social consequences of criticizing fraternities. I think fraternities are misogynistic and cannot be reformed.
I’ve always believed that everyone should try their hardest at their job. Whether it is being the President of the United States or cleaning bathrooms at CVS, which is a field that I am sadly very experienced in, people should take pride in doing their jobs right and in doing them well. I don’t think the Campus Safety and Security staff subscribe to this same belief.
Sometimes what’s on your plate might be difficult to swallow. Recognizing the individual’s participation in an exploitative and unjust food system is not easy, and finding constructive ways to change the system requires creativity. Common ways to address the consumer guilt of participating in a broken, conventional food system often turn into attempts to be a conscious consumer, a problematic movement led by rich white folk.
It’s been exactly one year since we woke up to Donald Trump as President-elect of the United States. It’s felt like a lifetime, hasn’t it? This past year has been exhausting.
Baltimore‘s crime rate has historically been high, but it has recently seen a spike with more than 300 homicides occurring in both 2015 and 2017. As of press time, 303 homicides have occurred in this year alone.
The 2016 Republican candidate, voters, and platform for President of the United States was incredibly serpentine (and successful) in defending their candidate, Donald Trump, against controversy and scandal. I argue that one of the most powerful tools he and his supporters use for both debates and defense against scandal is the tactic of controlling the conversation.
Vaping has become incredibly ubiquitous over the past few years. It’s been showing up at parties, on campus and pretty much anywhere else you’d expect people to be. CDC statistics show that 38 percent of high schoolers and 13 percent of middle schoolers have already tried vaping. Vapes have been allowed to proliferate with virtually no oversight by any public health or government agency.
Growing up, I never felt like I was treated any differently for being born a woman. My mother and my teachers and Disney Channel taught me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I believed that so much I never even considered it might not be true.
The recent rise in crime in Baltimore, including the Charles Village area, has become an issue affecting Hopkins students and affiliates over the past few months.
In 1977, former editors of The Johns Hopkins News-Letter founded a small publication that was dedicated to covering the arts and events in our city with an alternative perspective.
Hopkins students love to talk about their research. Admissions advertises research as one of the key reasons to come to the University, and it seems as if every student is involved — at least, every STEM student. Research is much less common among students interested in the humanities and social sciences. For these students, internships are the best way to get experience.
Megyn Kelly’s struggle moving from Fox News to a morning show on NBC has been well-documented, as has her subsequent lack of personality. What made Kelly so divisive (and terrifying) at Fox has changed: In her new position, she is utterly palatable and utterly bland.
Throughout the past month, the Students for Environmental Action (SEA) and Hopkins Feminists have come together to discuss and highlight the intersection between feminism and environmentalism through weekly themed tabling events.
Here’s a list of things I will never understand: calculus, cilantro-haters, people that think it’s okay to walk slowly down narrow pathways in large groups. And yet, among this already comprehensive list of daily grievances, there is one that sticks out far more than any others, one that happens to be quite a familiar occurrence among college students these days — the insistence of our generation to remain aloof online.
Over 200 cities, counties and territories in the United States, Canada and Mexico are currently in a bidding war to become the home of Amazon’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The popular Seattle-based online retail company is currently reviewing proposals, at least two of which came from Baltimore.
The most significant news of the recent Austrian elections was the dramatic rightward and populist shift in Austrian politics. The Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), a center-right party with far-right views on immigration, secured 31.5 percent of the vote, making it the largest party in the Austrian Parliament. The Social Democratic Party won exactly the same number of seats, but lost the chancellorship. Furthermore, it will likely lose its coalition partner status to the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), a blatantly far-right populist, nationalist and xenophobic party.
In the past few weeks, there have been a lot of very controversial articles in The News-Letter. When something in this newspaper is controversial, it’s very easy to tell. The article rapidly moves to the top of our most read and recent comment lists. When it’s shared on Facebook, there are over 20 comments with even more replies. There are Twitter rants where the article is shared and talked about.
In 1993, peace activist Philip Berrigan and six other people from the Baltimore Emergency Response Network (BERN) protested the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s (APL) nuclear weapons program by spreading ashes on the ground to symbolize the victims of warfare, as well as handing out leaflets. Berrigan and his fellow activists were arrested. John Wilhelm, the APL spokesperson, responded to the events in The Baltimore Sun by saying, “We really don’t have a comment on today’s events. It’s a periodic occurrence.”
