This Monday, I traveled to space. While my corporeal body remained in the familiar comfort of the first floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, my perception was responding to a different world altogether—the unwieldiness of zero-gravity movement and a limitless expanse of black, punctuated by hazy starlight.
This past Monday, over 400 students, Stanley Druckenmiller and I packed into Pickard Theater to listen to John Kasich. The talk was very informative. For instance, I learned that Ohio had dealt with race, that presidential power is overrated and that the Nixon White House tapes probably include a recording of an 18-year-old Kasich.
As students, we are constantly generating data on campus, whether we know it or not. From using Blackboard to Polaris to Outlook, we are engaging in conversations with these channels through our actions online. How does Bowdoin treat this information?
From the decision to get up in the morning to the decision to go to bed at night, our days are filled with choices. There are big decisions, like whether to move to a different city, state or country.
There are only two kinds of people in the world. Are you left-brained or right-brained? Type A or Type B? Are you a 1 or a 0? Quantitative or creative? Creator or builder? Art or algorithms?
On January 21, 2002, the quirky trio of Jackie, Matt and Inez graced the television screens of millions of PBS kids viewers across the United States for the first time. For a glorious 23 and a half minutes, audiences joined the trio and traveled to Cyberchase, a digital universe, where they protected Motherboard, “the brain of the giant computer system that oversees all of Cyberspace,” from cybercrimes committed by Hacker.
The passengers who undertake the 15-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna are of a particular breed—what could possibly fuel a desire to reach the northern Swedish frontiers? This endless expanse of wintry emptiness, save for the sparse scatter of birch trees that dot the flat horizon every now and then?
Cecile and I found ourselves in a crowd of beaked babushkas, their perfume reeking nostalgically as we passed, calling to mind stuffy tea times in my grandma’s living room, surrounded by porcelain knick-knacks dusted with age.
It was by a stroke of fate and a seating algorithm that on an EasyJet flight I met Nino.
Romi and I were on our return flight from London. While traveling in pairs is normally not an issue, on a plane with three-seat aisles, the third seat is left to chance.
Autumn hugged Uppsala, a small college town on the periphery of Stockholm. The air had chilled, the sky had greyed and things were dying beautifully. We paused on the way to a museum at a café for a brief indulgence of coffee and kanelbulle and ran into a fellow American abroad.
This is the story of four American girls—wait—one half-Jamaican, half-Lithuanian girl, Tyrah; one Israeli-born, but Belgian passport-carrying girl, Romi; one Serbian-American girl, me; and the token American amongst us, Cecile. This is the story of how four girls found themselves playing King’s Cup until one in the morning in Kloster bar, near the Södermalm neighborhood in Stockholm.
Breakfast at the Paramount in Boston meant a 45-minute wait in the standing line to order, a subsequent fight for a table and an inevitable shouting match between Conversation and Noise. “Izvini sto kasnim!” I yelled, “I’m sorry I’m late!”
She waved at the air to both forgive and beckon me to her table.
When President Rose addressed the Class of 2020 for the first time last year, he spoke about Bowdoin being our new home—an ode to new beginnings. My attention was drawn to the row of flags behind him—the French flag, American, Afghan, Jamaican.