Ed Observers

Sometimes, travel alone

What I’ve learned about vacations is that you need to be okay with opening your wallet. Go to a nice restaurant. Pay the steep admission fee to enter the palace rather than admire it from the outside and speculate about what lies within.

All writers should debate

Debate's use of the voice, face, and body as articulators, along with its time constraint, allow it to do something that writing has never managed to do: Turn language and logic into a sport.

Republicans are people too

As a card-carrying liberal on a left-leaning campus amid the increasingly dominant (or at least dominantly vocal) left-wing atmosphere that has come to define college culture across much of the United States, I have a confession to make: I kind of like Rand Paul.

Getting back to basics with books

Just thinking on the events from the past week, there’s a lot I could have written about. There was a government shutdown, the start of the Winter Olympics, and Trump making inappropriate comments on the #MeToo movement.

Are you there, financial aid office?

Let me get right to the point: This is about money. That can be a hard thing to talk about, and not everyone likes to do it, I know. Maybe you don't like to do it either, and that's why you answer all my questions with the simple yet evocative, "Take out more loans!"

Happy holidays, you filthy animals

Christmas tree pretzels. I love them, you love them, and they’re a longstanding UR tradition that we can all get…

Some advice for CS majors

Computer science is a difficult subject. It involves the breakdown of abstract problems into formal, model-based solutions that can be…

We must be feminists

“God, not another one,” I thought. “What a shame.” That’s how I reacted when I learned about the allegations (since…

What is triggering, really?

Michael Haneke made the movie “Funny Games” twice, once in Austria, and then again in America. The latter is a…

There’s a storm coming

Weather has always been a central part of my life. It terrified me at age four, amazed me at age…