Dear President Obama,

I am writing to you (and to any other American who wishes to share in this) because I, like many Americans, want to help our country get back on track. Call it a cry for help or a public plea of a distressed citizen, but I digress.

My personal situation is hardly the worst it could be: I’m a graduate student living with my parents and partially self-funding my education with my own personal savings (I’m taking out loans for the rest). On the other hand, I graduated in May of 2010 and have worked a total of only five months since then at a variety of jobs, always for $12 an hour or less. Compared to other people my age, I consider myself to be incredibly lucky.

I have over four hundred friends on Facebook. Sometimes I wonder how many of them I actually talk to, how many I actually hang out with, or whether or not it matters if I do either of those things. Virtual communication and social media undoubtedly have many advantages, the most important of which being the immediacy of getting in touch with someone, like with text messaging. Social media, e-mail, text messaging, these are all synonymous with instant communication, or better yet, the instant gratification of immediately establishing contact with someone. But I wonder, how much of the human experience gets lost in virtual communication?

I did not know what to expect when I decided to go to New York on Saturday to check out Occupy Wall Street. In fact, I had only opted to go after seeing the now famous footage of police brutality, courtesy of inspector Anthony Bologna aka “Tony Baloney”(video). I had originally planned to go with a couple of friends, but that did not pan out. For a moment I was hesitant to go by myself because I rarely travel to New York City, let alone get involved in a protest in which people have been beaten, pepper sprayed, and arrested. But I decided to go anyway.

Modern American Youth are notoriously referred to as Generation Y or Millennials. Attempts to name and define our generation have mostly come from those who are not members of this generation. Our identity as a group, as a demographic, as a social class: it must come from within. We cannot let the world tell us who we are; we must assert our own identity. We are Modern American Youth. I call us the MAY Generation.

Whatever one may say, it is impossible to deny the power of music to make humans feel emotion. Even if one is personally unable to feel a connection to specific instances of sound, that person, at the same time, would readily admit that others seem connected to it. How does music, these arbitrary arrangements of patterns of sound, elicit these feelings of connectedness from us?

Ralph Waldo Emerson is usually credited as being the father of American literary and philosophical thought, laying the foundation for what Dewey and James would later call pragmatism, though it is worth noting that this discourse was in use as early as the signing of the American Constitution.  Pragmatism is generally characterized by an optimistic faith in the potential of the individual, whose perceptions and thoughts give him the power to shape the surrounding world at his whim.  Embraced by luminaries such as Whitman and Thoreau, it was carried …

Deadheads—as devout fans of the legendary American jam band The Grateful Dead are colloquially called—often find it difficult to describe their fascination with all things Jerry, Phil, Weir, and Hunter,

In conjunction with my honors thesis on William S. Burroughs, I have been recording my dreams in a journal for the past two semesters.  The following is a brief account of a dream I had roughly one week ago.  It took me several days before the symbolism jumped out at me and I realized that it was the perfect segway into our talks on genealogy. 

It is typically quite common for a woman to remain in an unhappy, unsatisfying relationship – even when she clearly has the decision to leave right in front of her. Why, then, does she stay? And, if she does eventually leave, why does it take so long?

Sport is often the first platform that in times of harsh inequality breaks the color barrier. Jackie Robinson is a great example of this; he was drafted into the league and immediately had major success. When other teams saw him, they realized the potential of African-American athletes and began scouting and drafting their own talent.