Behind the spectacle of the Beijing Olympics and the record setting performances of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and many others, a brewing controversy over the exploitation of young athletes was muffled in the interests of athletic excellence, national pride and international harmony. Not that these aren’t worthy goals, even arguably outweighing the consequences of continued [...]

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I am conflicted in my criticism of our new Center for Community Engagement. On the one hand, it was only through a fellowship with the Center that I was able to spend a month in New Orleans this summer working with Habitat for Humanity, and it was good work. Inasmuch as I was directly helping [...]

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Students began to arrive on campus the morning of August 24. New to the area and bleary-eyed, they looked around at the new students and buildings that would surround them for the four years to follow. The occasion for this mass of first-year students? “First year orientation.” These words don’t sound unique to Amherst at [...]

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In 2005, five high school seniors agreed to open every facet of their lives to our country’s prying eyes. Perhaps this summary of American Teen would be more exciting if it weren’t roughly identical to the taglines of 90 percent of MTV’s afternoon programming. Although this latest foray into teenagers’ hidden lives is earnest and [...]

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As good a place to begin as any: on a bench, on the campus of fictional Winesburg College in real Ohio, with our hero ruminating on the new clothes he bought for college—in large part because he has just vomited all over them in the dean’s office—which clothes he bought in the first place so [...]

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“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera once wrote, “is an unhappy person.” Judging by the resignation of two prime ministers in the past year, Japanese political leaders have found their historically stable nation, with the world’s second largest economy of $4.7 trillion, in a despondent state. [...]

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For years, I’ve followed politics very closely. I can probably name more members of Congress than can most Americans. Yet even I had never heard of the obscure Alaskan governor whom John McCain had suddenly catapulted onto the national stage.
As my dad filled me in, and as I later read about her online, I, as [...]

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As NBC broadcast the impressively choreographed opening ceremonies to the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, most of the world’s attention was focused elsewhere on something graver than the spectacle of 400 shirtless men drumming in perfect harmony. Footage of Russian tanks rolling into Georgia disturbed the serenity of the ceremony and seemed [...]

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As Amherst students were justly celebrating our return to prominence on the US News & World Report’s listings (which is awkward, considering how we declared them meaningless last year), another of the Five Colleges was being placed on Radar Online’s list of worst colleges in America for being the “biggest ripoff” in academia. (Radar, for [...]

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The sticker affixed to the front of Float (Side One Dummy, 2008) brags that The Alternative Press considers it “one of the most important records of the year, if not the decade.” That’s somewhat of a stretch, but there’s no doubt that Flogging Molly’s latest release is its most mature and significant. What little the [...]

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