Drew Van Kuiken
Number of articles: 11First article: September 19, 2013
Latest article: May 2, 2014
Popular
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all out of love Timeflies when you’re abusing Adderall
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all out of love No more clowning around: living costs in major cities too high
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all out of love No room for generalization in the Opinion section
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all out of love The allure of Don Draper: why the ‘anti-hero’ in modern TV is so compelling
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all out of love To Sochi and beyond: measuring the economic toll of the Olympics
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all out of love: Timeflies when you’re abusing Adderall
Timeflies, what a rush. I expected great music from the duo at the Ivies concert—songs like the one whose chorus repeated “motherfucker what up” 15 times never fail—but I didn’t expect such natural flow from a YouTube superstar. I originally thought a freestyle seemed ambitious, but boy did he deliver.
Opening with a list of 150 random Bowdoin related things took some pretty serious skill, but his emphatic endorsement of Bowdoin’s drug habits really put his whole performance on another level. It takes guts to shout “man, every school has Adderall!” before a group of 1,500 college students, guts that clearly only Timeflies had.
Timeflies’ claim was relatively typical: musicians everywhere love to talk about their drug habits. It’s almost strangely fitting that Timeflies, which comes from Tufts University, would brag about how normal Adderall is. Yet, sarcasm aside, it should be painfully clear how inappropriate his comment was.
For now, let’s forget about the fact that Bowdoin’s recent Adderall bust forced two students to resign from the school and 10 others to face disciplinary action. Despite the very real ramifications of “resigning” from a college mid-year, the argument must be wider than the fate of a few students.
The relaxed attitude that Timeflies and many Bowdoin students take toward Adderall is scary and needs rethinking before the problem becomes serious. While certainly not as dangerous as other frequently abused opiates like OxyContin, Adderall is still an amphetamine.
Amphetamines, called “speed” on the street, are addictive stimulants. Adderall typically comes in much lower doses than street amphetamines, but the effects are similar. Users develop an intense focus, lose their appetites and feel more awake.
These effects have a wide appeal and with the number of prescriptions skyrocketing—sales have quintupled since 2002 according to a Huffington Post article—the pills are becoming more and more available. A University of Southern California study recently showed that 95 percent of students could obtain a false diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (the disorder for which Adderall is prescribed) by faking the symptoms most commonly associated with it. Doctors are handing out hard drugs and people are developing serious, debilitating addictions.
The pills pose a serious threat for anyone who abuses them. Even in academic situations, the pills put serious stress on the heart and cause erratic behavior. Over time, users begin to act similarly to meth addicts. But given that government studies have shown 30 percent of student users report taking Adderall and other prescription stimulants to stay awake and party, the implications of the abuse become far more serious.
When combined with alcohol, Adderall suppresses many of the body’s cues to stop drinking. On the drug, people can drink more and stay up longer. The heart takes even heavier abuse as Adderall counteracts the depressive quality of alcohol. According to a 2013 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, visits to the hospital related to prescription stimulants nearly quadrupled among young adults between 2006 and 2010, with nearly half of the 15,000 visits due to mixing alcohol with stimulants. Still, people refuse to see Adderall as a dangerous drug. Only 2 percent of students reported seeing the drug as “very dangerous” in a 2007 study by the National Institute of Health. Eighty-one percent viewed the drug as “not dangerous at all” or only “slightly dangerous.”
Even here at Bowdoin, kids seem to take the drug rather lightly. According to a 2013 Orient article, 15 percent of students on campus reported having used the drug in 2012 and a whopping 42 percent overestimated that number. In other words, kids see it as a relatively normal thing.Timeflies’ assertion fits in with the Bowdoin ethos that way. The drug is no big deal, or so the thinking goes. The recent spike in media coverage surrounding OxyContin and the road to heroin addiction should strike fear in the students who view Adderall as safe. Prescription drugs certainly aren’t safe just because a doctor hands them out, but few seem to recognize the danger. Adderall is an incredibly dangerous drug when abused and Bowdoin students need to view it that way. Until the campus has a change of heart though, we’re just asking for a disaster.
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all out of love: No more clowning around: living costs in major cities too high
Ernest Hemingway once famously said that “courage is grace under pressure.”
When a group of warriors clad in skin-tight clown suits bravely stood in front of the Google Buses in San Francisco, protesting the Silicon Valley-led spike in living cost, I couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of Hemingway’s phrase. Books may well cover Kent State, Tiananmen Square and the San Francisco clown protest in future editions.
But in case they don’t, the clown protest deserves attention in the present. I’m a proud resident of suburban New Jersey, but I can only withstand so many jokes—I have to find a real city one day, or else my sense of self-worth may be crushed. It’s a struggle many Bowdoin students face, as seniors ship out to a huge number of jobs covering every corner of the globe and underclassmen search for internships right alongside them.
But some of Bowdoin graduates’ top destinations relegate all but the richest citizens to the outskirts of the city. Data compiled by the real estate service Zillow show a trend in five of America’s biggest cities. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York City, middle class families almost universally struggle to rent even the cheapest housing near city centers.
While many Bowdoin students might make enough money to live within any city’s most expensive area codes, there is a reason we don’t rank first on Payscale.com’s return-on-investment list: not everyone here is motivated by money. Yet, to claim that some ulterior motive should relegate them to the city limits hurts both the student and the city itself.
Cities began as the American dream in its most accessible form, but Zillow’s data shows the dream may be dying. City centers first began gentrifying in the early 1960s as decaying housing projects and booming business districts brought affluent families into newly built homes. The gentrification made sense from an economic standpoint; people wanted to live in the most desirable places and paid accordingly. But the gentrification failed to take into account the impact of a diverse society on a city’s welfare—reinforcing America’s difficulty with social mobility and the income inequality gap. Given that cities support an entire spectrum of jobs, it makes little sense to exclude the less lucrative from contributing an equally important service.
The clowns acted as part of a bigger movement to lower San Francisco’s costs, one that’s gotten more desperate with time. Recent highlights include the set of angry protesters who handed out pamphlets in front of Google Executive Kevin Rose’s house that called him a destructive parasite. To San Francisco’s credit, the city has put considerable resources into fixing the situation. Mayor Ed Lee ’74 recently announced that he planned to build or rehabilitate 30,000 new homes by 2020 and designate a third of those homes as permanently affordable to lower income residents. His office has also proposed several other policies designed to keep residents currently in rent-controlled housing from moving out and incentivize the construction of low income apartment building.
Mayor Lee’s reforms should be commended as a step in the right direction, but only that. San Francisco and many similar business hubs throughout America will continue to face serious challenges to their economic diversity in the coming years. The moneyed interests in each hub will make most reform difficult, but often the most powerful decision comes from standing in the face of what looked invincible, sort of like the clowns did.
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all out of love: Silver dollars: donations aggravate Nate
Washington glows unlike any other on the right day when the sun reflects off the gold-lined pockets of America’s politicians and lobbyists. One can’t help but feel blinded by the sheer capitalistic nature of the situation. The politicians—kings of fame and faithfully exorbitant donations—can stride confidently through what has become their playground, unafraid of public opinion, any expectation of passing productive legislation, or holding themselves to a moral code.
This attitude permeates the entire city, and with good reason: campaign donations endorse it. Few can escape its alluring grasp, and fewer still challenge it. Yet one man can make even the hardiest Washingtonian shake in his Gucci slippers and inspire Congressmen to tremble beneath their oily campaign war chests. Mitch McConnell wakes up in the middle of the night screaming his name and Ezra Klein studied the ancient Haitian art of Voodoo to give himself a competitive advantage.
I’m talking about Nate Silver, the Jewish man from Eastern Michigan who everyone in Washington wants on their team. He first burst onto the scene in 2003, writing for Baseball Prospectus and revolutionizing the fantasy baseball industry. Silver then branched out in 2008, creating a political modeling website named FiveThirtyEight.com (a reference to the number of electors in the Electoral college) with the idea of reaching a wider audience than just fantasy baseball players. The website predicted the outcomes of nationwide elections using a weighted poll aggregator designed by Silver himself. His methodology first predicted a big win for the Democrats in 2008, which the Republicans conveniently ignored. But when he correctly predicted every senate race being held that year as well, he was impossible to ignore.
Republicans’ anger with Silver dissipated by 2010, when Silver correctly predicted a Republican takeover of the house. Then, the Democrats weren’t too fond of him. He later became a national celebrity over the 2012 cycle, with Republicans viciously attacking his pro-Democratic predictions. The Democrats, in turn, labeled him the second coming of the Oracle at Delphi. Most readers should know the story from here: Silver was right and everyone was awed. He went from loved to hated and hated to loved faster than Bill Clinton. And, just as Bill Clinton never seems to step out of the spotlight, Nate Silver has returned for the 2014 midterm election cycle. On March 23, he offered a decisive prediction: the Republicans would take the Senate 51 seats to 49.
But instead of offering the typical irate denouncement, Democrats responded differently this time. While maintaining that Silver’s predictions left room for error, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began sending out emails saying that because Silver predicted big losses, the Democrats needed to raise huge amounts of money to remedy the situation. At first glance, this may look ridiculous. It probably even looks ridiculous after the second and third looks as well. That’s mostly because it is.
Silver’s methodology relies on candidate quality, state partisanship, incumbency, and head to head polls. Both state partisanship and incumbency pay virtually no attention to fundraising capabilities; candidate quality and head to head polls both rely on a variety of factors, fundraising being just one aspect of them.
But their strategy could work. The Democrats have been known for huge fundraising capabilities in the past and this jolt from Silver’s dismal prediction may lead them to raise enough money to prove it wrong. Silver mostly confirmed what many political minds in D.C. have been thinking for months, but he also gave much needed publicity to a major problem for the Democrats—relying on donors funds to change their fate.
Regardless of whether one roots for the Republicans or the Democrats, money shouldn’t greatly alter the outcome of a campaign like this. Donors spent $7 billion on the most recent Presidential election and $4 billion on the 2010 midterm elections. This money sometimes goes to worthy advertising—like Mitch McConnell’s recent video that Jon Stewart turned into the national phenomenon of #McConnelling—but much of it goes to attack ads in places like rural West Virginia.
The clear answer here should be to return to the McCain-Feingold reform act of 2002—which didn’t even take all the money out of politics, but just put something vaguely similar to a cap on donations. Sometimes, however, the clear answer isn’t the popular one in Washington. And until something gets done, Silver may have to deal with the possibility of enormous donations skewing his models.
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all out of love: To Sochi and beyond: measuring the economic toll of the Olympics
One of the first lessons any young, New Jersey travel hockey-team player receives is one of decay. Even buildings as spectacular as those that host the Olympics fall to pieces after a few short years. I know this because I had a long, illustrious travel hockey career. It was full of small pleasures, from crack-of-dawn Tuesday morning practices to week-long road trips to Lake Placid, New York. Those days still inspire a special sort of nostalgia for me though—a time to consider my own personal athletic shortcomings. It also gave team parents an excuse to drink away the sadness that spending an entire week in Lake Placid, New York will inspire.
If you’re wondering why a group of 30 young boys would spend a week in a place as desolate, hopeless and sad as Lake Placid every year, liberal arts school is the right place for you and your inquisitive mind.
Most importantly, Lake Placid hosted the 1980 Winter Olympics, home to a rink that hosted the “miracle on ice” semi-final hockey match between the Soviet Union and the U.S. On yearly trips, my teammates and I wandered around Lake Placid, visiting the decaying 25-year-old attractions that once hosted the world’s greatest athletes. The ski jump was significantly creepier when surrounded by dense woods with no spectators in sight, and by then the Olympic bobsled course more closely resembled a small sledding hill.
While time treated Lake Placid like the early 2000s treated Lindsay Lohan, the town didn’t begin as an adorable child star. In 1980, Olympic spectators were stranded for hours, freezing and unable to find proper transportation. Even the athletes found the hotel accommodations—which were later turned into a prison—subpar. The games reportedly cost $90 million.
If you have not already heard, the Sochi Olympics cost $51 billion. The price ballooned despite reporters’ hilarious accounts of open wires, yellow tap water, and wolf-like creatures roaming the halls of their hotels. Aside from the hotel peculiarities, the rest of the event admittedly went off with few problems. Russia’s stadiums appeared to be beautifully built and security never became a huge problem. Even Sochi’s tropical climate couldn’t hold back the games’ ultimate success, since the snow Russia trucked in held up despite 50 degree Fahrenheit weather.
But Sochi may have run out of luck the moment the Olympics ended. The very same hotels that caused reporters so much anxiety will now have to bring in roughly double the guests that they’ve historically attracted. These hotels, the cheapest of which start at around $140 a night, don’t have any good strategies to attract visitors. Foreigners traveling to Russia typically prefer to travel to places that don’t require a visa to enter, and vacationing Russians either can’t afford the high prices or have so much money that they would rather leave the country.
Money theoretically shouldn’t have been a problem. Supposedly, half the investment for Sochi’s development originally came from private investors. But as projects turned unprofitable and stadiums never materialized, the Russian government stepped in and kindly forced its citizenry to shoulder over 90 percent of the total cost. The public may never get a chance to see the fruits of their investment, but they did put on a good two-week show.
One can hardly be surprised that things look grim for Rio de Janiero, which plans on hosting both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Despite the notorious difficulty of hosting even one of these events, Rio de Janiero decided to surpass even the highest of expectations. When FIFA asked them to build eight stadiums, they decided to build 12. This happened even though two of those stadiums now exist in cities that don’t even have a first division soccer team. The optimism proved infectious, with Brazilians reportedly ecstatic about the prospect of hosting both events.
But things have quickly turned south in Brazil. Protests erupted last summer asking for “FIFA-standard” hospitals and a construction accident in November killed two workers in Sao Paulo. Instead of heralding a new age, both the World Cup and the Olympics may prove a stinging reminder of how far Brazil has to come before truly modernizing.
Rio and Sochi only provide two examples of a much larger problem: placing massive, expensive and high-pressure tournaments in “exotic” or up-and-coming areas often places an undue pressure on already fragile economies. Countries, both developed and developing, treat the Olympics as a high-stakes gamble, wasting billions in public funds in the process. They trade two weeks of international glory for an eternal white elephant, withering away in sad, desperate and lonely places like Lake Placid. In the case of Brazil, they may have even traded the once-bright future of a rapidly growing country for a glut of state-of-the-art stadiums. All economic thought says this should stop, but it doesn’t. Very little value lies in gambling on hamlets hurriedly transformed into multi-billion dollar destinations, but countries continue to do it. The risk occasionally results in newfound tourist destinations like Barcelona, but more often this leads to a vast assortment of Lake Placids scattered around the world.
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all out of love: The allure of Don Draper: why the ‘anti-hero’ in modern TV is so compelling
Don Draper commands attention—enough to merit an entire TV show, in fact. On the ’60s era drama “Mad Men,” Draper commits heinous acts and lives by an extraordinarily questionable code of ethics, yet still never fails to fascinate.
Askmen.com has hailed him as a “role model for men everywhere,” and he is among those named “men of the year” by GQ magazine almost every year.
Even for those aware of his flaws, Draper holds a peculiar attraction. His serial philandering and rampant sexism certainly earn him his fair share of criticism, but casually dismissing him as the villain of a TV show does ignore the bigger problem: people look up to this man.
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all out of love: On the media: in defense of Justin Bieber
The mainstream media’s embrace of Justin Bieber is no surprise in a climate dominated by sites like Barstool.
Last Thursday, Justin Bieber was charged with drunk driving, resisting arrest and driving without a valid license at 4 a.m. in Miami Beach. By midday, his story had captivated America and become the most interesting cable news story since Paula Deen collapsed under the weight of her own greasy, deep-fried sense of ethics last year.
Accordingly, when MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell invited former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman onto her show to discuss the NSA’s future, and Bieber’s arraignment hearing began during the middle of the interview, she had little choice but to interrupt Harman mid-sentence and cut to a live feed of the courtroom.
When later questioned about the appropriateness of their decision, Mitchell reasoned that she has “more foreign policy coverage five days a week than any other program on television.” Apparently Mitchell’s painstaking foreign coverage had earned her the right to cover celebrity indiscretions.
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all out of love: Insurance woes: Obamacare proving ineffective
106,856. That is the number of people who successfully selected—not bought—a new healthcare plan this past October under the Obama administration’s legislation often referred to as ‘Obamacare.’ The program’s official name is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a moniker that now seems ironic, given recent struggles.
A mere 27,000 people dove into the behemoth website that is healthcare.gov and emerged having successfully selected a plan. For those in need of a refresher, healthcare.gov is the federal government’s version of a highly touted new-age online marketplace; the particulars of the ACA were centered on the assumption of its functionality. In Maine, a state that opted to use the federal government’s website, only 271 people selected a plan by the end of the month.
As kindly noted by Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas, more people caught chlamydia last month than selected a plan under Obamacare. He also noted that more people followed Nickelback on Twitter, and bought Yoko Ono’s first album than selected a plan.
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all out of love: Athletes in chief: putting sports on a pedestal
Growing up in New Jersey, I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by really loud Yankees fans. Those fans were often drowned out by Red Sox fans, ever tenacious in their goal of convincing me that Boston deserves my support. As an apathetic Tigers fan, I’ve loved every second of it. Just kidding.
When Boston laid waste to Detroit’s pitching, it didn’t really bother me. And then, when Boston dispatched St. Louis to win the World Series last week, I wasn’t sure how to feel. On one hand, my friends’ “rediscovered” love for their hometown team brought nothing but bad memories. But I kept seeing Big Papi’s toothy smile, and then I’d smile, and I couldn’t really be mad.
When Big Papi—otherwise known as David Ortiz—spoke after the Boston Bombing, I, along with the rest of the world, couldn’t help but support him. He embodied strength in a time of weakness and became a leader that Boston so desperately needed. And when he hit a monstrous home run to lift Boston over Detroit, almost singlehandedly sending his city to the world series, I felt that same admiration. He is a man who I just want to like. He appeals to me despite my affiliations and I can’t help but root for him.
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all out of love: Getting news at school: keeping up with news outside the bubble
Throughout my childhood, I had a problem sleeping. Unlike seemingly everyone else in the world, I hated sleeping. I’d lie in bed for hours, thinking about the cool stuff I was sure I was missing.
Once I thought I’d suffered long enough—generally by 4 a.m.—I would jump out of bed and run down the stairs in search of fun activities. While I never found much more than a warm, staticky TV screen, I did get a lot of TV watching done. My days typically began with a few reruns of SportsCenter until my parents came down and subjected me to the Today Show. This usually just made me angry—I really, really didn’t care about cupcake recipes.
But over time, I learned to appreciate the Today Show. I didn’t start baking cupcakes but I did begin to learn what was going on in the world. Sure, I didn’t have a deep understanding, but I got enough information to dominate political arguments with my other 8-year-old friends. Over time, this interest flowered into a really convincing college essay topic. I wrote about how I read newspapers every morning and followed every update from the Capitol like a really boring gossip columnist. I talked about how I wanted to be involved with politics for the rest of my life and how much I loved knowing what was going on in the world.
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all out of love: No room for generalization in the Opinion section
Last Tuesday, the federal government shut down. And while I likely have some civic duty to provide you with my enlightened opinion on this legitimately significant event, this column is a selfish endeavor, so I will not. Also, go read the New York Times.
Instead, I’d like to use this precious space to brag: two weeks ago, the Orient published the first of my ramblings. Now, for those of you who have been calling me Edward R. Murrow, I’m flattered, but please stop. I know many see the Orient as a steppingstone to the National Review Online, but I must stay humble in the face of great success.
And although seeing my delightfully pixelated headshot appear next to the column name I spent so long perfecting certainly gave me a thrill, something was amiss. I looked around the paper, closely examining my compatriots in rambling. Their articles provided serious reflections on issues important to every Bowdoin student. Mine told people to laugh. Oh well. But then I glanced at the editorial, which proudly proclaimed: “Help Us.” (September 13) I shuddered before realizing I could still probably write for the Drudge Report one day.
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all out of love: Ode to the sexual deviant: laughing at politics
I know I may be lonely in this opinion, but I’d like to raise my glass to Anthony Weiner. And Eliot Spitzer, for what it’s worth. But not to Mark Sanford. No, Mr. Sanford can go celebrate elsewhere.
I’d like to raise my glass in honor of these (not-so) fine men, who so willingly made us laugh time and time again this summer. These men, who showed us that given even when the spotlight one more time, they could still fail so profoundly. A special thanks should go to Weiner as well, for showing us how close we can all get to real, tangible political power despite our proclivity for provocative picture taking.
As a young kid, I sincerely wanted to believe in politics. And even as a starry-eyed young high-schooler, I still tried to take the good with the bad, to see the virtue in even the greatest failure. I desperately wanted to not cringe at seemingly every other story coming out of the Capitol. And then John Boehner flipped off Harry Reid, and I realized how absurdly comical it all was.