“The football team remains terrible—but sheesh, that was cool.”
The flash of the lights. The crack of the bat. The buzz of the crowd—BACs cookin’ well above .08. The smell of the turf. The taste of victory and second-hand Juul exhaust.
Sitting in a coffee shop off Route 1 in Yarmouth, Zak Ringelstein was tweeting at the Portland Press Herald. They had just endorsed his opponent. Narrating his response to the room, he said the Herald had said he was too radical.
It has been a tough couple weeks for beer. Nevertheless, we’re back providing our readers with the content they crave about the worst beers on the market. We were chided after our last review by the proud staff of the Orient that this is a “beer column,” and so we actually need to “write about beer.” To make up for this grave omission, we are bringing to you a surplus of beer this week—volume and variety, not word count— pushed together in ways that neither the father, the son nor the Brothers Bissell ever intended.
Our moderately filterless minds were recently asked to give a few buzzwords about what defines a Bowdoin student. We felt that this was an awfully loaded question. How can you define students who hail from wide swaths of the world?
Welcome sweet readers,
For guys like us, the explosion of craft beer has been great. Instead of developing fully formed personalities, we can learn a simple vocabulary, e.g. “citra,” “dry-hopped,” “milk stout,” “double IPA,” “notes,” “you’ve had too much,” “I’m cutting you off” and then be semi-functioning members of society, mindlessly quoting “Good Will Hunting” back and forth while drinking overpriced beer to distract from the fact that we have not a shred of individuality.
President Clayton Rose published an op-ed in TIME Magazine arguing for the importance of the liberal arts. Roughly, his argument is that today “intellectual engagement is too often mocked,” leaving us in a “distressing place… where facts are willfully ignored or conveniently dismissed” and where “Hypocrisy runs rampant and character appears to no longer be a requirement for leadership.” His proposed solution is one we’ve heard from him before: intellectual fearlessness, the notion that one “can consider ideas and material that challenge their points of view, which may run counter to deeply held beliefs, unsettles them or may make them uncomfortable.”
I take issue with much of Rose’s argument, and what I find most troubling is his seeming inability to articulate, with substance, a goal, mission and role for the liberal arts that extends beyond banalities.