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My freshman fall, I was still reeling from two breakups I’d gone through my last year of high school. One was with a friend, and one was with a boyfriend. At 17 years old, the loss of those relationships wreaked total havoc on my sense of self.
I am a profoundly uncomfortable person. I don’t make people feel uncomfortable, and I often feel emotionally comfortable, but I struggle to be physically comfortable—especially when seated. I squirm, tap my foot, adjust and re-adjust my seat.
I’ve always held that the coffee from Bowdoin’s Cafe is superior to the brew in the dining halls. Even though both locations carry the same types of coffee made by the same company, the Seacoast Coffee Company, I thought I could taste a difference.
Many Bowdoin students flock to The Little Dog Coffee Shop, a Brunswick fixture located on Maine Street, but as students return to campus for a new year, they will return to a new version of The Little Dog, complete with changes in decor, an expanded menu and extended hours on Thursdays and Fridays for “Lit Nights” and live music.
My mom drinks from her Bowdoin coffee mug every morning. And she’s got the whole process down to a science. Grab mug, choose coffee flavor, shove mug into Keurig, wait. Pick mug up, walk over to comfy corner table, do crossword of the day and drink coffee.
As I drove through Brunswick Industrial Park toward Elevated Remedies, I was hit by the unmistakable smell of weed. The skunk-like scent was unsurprising, but it disappeared as soon as I pulled up to the storefront.
Since opening in 2012, Tao Yuan—Pleasant Street’s Asian fusion restaurant—has been in the business of serving the delightfully unexpected. With dishes like “duck confit fried rice” and “Maine Jonah crab wide noodles,” chef and co-owner Cara Stadler deftly crafts a cuisine that is both delicious and surprising.
At 3 p.m. today, students, faculty and staff will gather around five exhibit cases on the second floor gallery of Hawthorne-Longfellow (H-L) Library for the opening of “Tension/Tenacity: Africana Studies at 50,” an exhibition that explores the five-decade history of Bowdoin’s Africana studies program, the John Brown Russwurm African American Center and the Black Student Union (formerly the African American Society).
For Rowan Byrne ’21, the first days of September mark not only the start of a new school year, but also the launch of a surf program he has been organizing since arriving at Bowdoin two years ago.
Unlike most seniors, Carolyn Brady ’19 had the opportunity to walk across two stages this summer: the first, in May, to collect her Bowdoin diploma, and the second, on June 22, to collect her sash and crown as Miss Maine 2019 at the Freeport Arts Center.
Even a cursory glance around campus reveals the ways in which the College has changed since its founding. Buildings, in a range of architectural styles across various time periods, reflect not only the College’s evolution, but also the changes in its leadership.
Brunswick has been home to a local cinema since 1908. The name and location of this theater have changed over the past century, but today, Eveningstar Cinema on Maine Street carries on the tradition as Brunswick’s go-to specialty box office.
Last June, we stuffed all of our books and beauty products into Phoebe’s old Volvo and hit the road. From Houston we blasted through Memphis, Nashville, D.C. and then New York, the city, eventually landing in Brunswick.
On March 28, 2019 there was a significant passing in my world. The series “Broad City” aired its final episode after a wildly successful five season run. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Broad City is a raunchy buddy comedy starring two millennial women living and working in New York City.
There should be a Schoolhouse Rock episode about how the Orient’s production night works. Without the help of a nifty jingle, I will not attempt to describe the full process, but rather set down here that it involves six rounds of edits, various photo and design checks and a weekly $50 snack budget.
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.
“Name a college from every state that touches the ocean,” Bob Stuart ’77 announced last Thursday in Kresge Auditorium. Teams of elementary schoolers grabbed their pencils and began listing off schools: Bowdoin in Maine, Tufts in Massachusetts, Stanford in California.
Rushing to catch a bus back to Jerusalem, Sophie stops at Sabich Shel Oved (Oved’s Sabich in English) for a not-quite sandwich, not-quite taco Israeli delicacy: sabich. Back in Brunswick, Eliana strolls down Maine Street after class and picks up lunch: sweet potato and fish tacos from the Taco the Town food truck.
If you walk past the Hannaford’s parking lot, you’ll find a small, white building with a sign that reads, “Welcome is our mission.” Inside, the main room is packed with people chatting, reading and drinking coffee.
Pete Seeger stood on the stage of Pickard Theater in front of a single microphone. He picked the strings of his signature long-neck banjo and whistled a gentle harmony, his foot tapping out the beat. After a minute, he stopped playing and began to explain the history of the long-neck banjo and the folk music he played on it.
Isabella Angel ’22 is too nervous to eat dinner, drinking ginger ale instead in hopes of calming her anxiety. In 10 minutes, she will no longer be a Bowdoin College student but Fulvius Nobilior, a Roman general and esteemed member of the Senate, where she will face her rival in a court case over stolen goods.
When you “take financial resources and human beings and juxtapose them such that they produce an added value in human beings,” what do you get? A college, according to former Bowdoin President Robert H. Edwards.
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.
We talk a lot about hometowns, both in our casual conversations and within the pages of the Orient. Given that this is a column on our home state of Texas, we felt it’d only be fitting to pay our respects to our home cities in the Lone Star State—places that, by virtue of their complexity and size, dazzle and confound us, often at the same time.
Alyce: I watched the fire from across the river, just close enough to see firemen weaving through the filigreed belfries. As I stood in the smoke among the assembled crowd of tearful Parisians, someone started singing the “Hail Mary”—“Je vous Salue Marie” in French.
“Game of Thrones” (GoT) is back, baby! Thank the Old Gods and the New. Heck, I’ll even thank R’hllor (sorry Shireen). There is a hole in my heart that can only be filled by the NFL or by dragons, and for now that hole is filled.
My friend Nathan and I knew we wanted to live in Reed House early in our first year. We loved the romance of the fire escapes, the neighborhood feeling and all our friends who lived there or who had lived there.
Hanging on Associate Professor of History Sarah McMahon’s wall, tucked between letters from family members and images of the Maine landscape, hangs a quote from former President of the College Robert Edwards: “These colleges, this one in particular, grew until 1970.
It’s easy to tell who the locals are at the Machane Yehuda Market. Jerusalemites gesture emphatically and bicker loudly with vendors. They insist on only the freshest. They know what’s in season and which stalls have access to the best produce.
When Alyssa Gillespie, now the chair of the department and associate professor of Russian, came to Bowdoin in the fall of 2016, only one student was majoring in Russian. Since then, Gillespie has worked tirelessly to expand the department, which now has 15 majors and two minors.
We talk a lot about hometowns, both in our casual conversations and within the pages of the Orient. Given that this is a column on our home state of Texas, we felt it’d only be fitting to pay our respects to our home cities in the Lone Star State—places that, by virtue of their complexity and size, dazzle and confound us, often at the same time.
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?
Many talks around faith this year have involved violence, often focusing on shootings in places of worship. But at Bowdoin, around the couches in 30 College and through events all across campus, members of the Brunswick community have gathered to engage in interfaith dialogue in a collaborative and optimistic manner.
During my first mammogram, I put my shoes in a locker before entering an inner waiting room. After I passed the front desk and made my way down a hallway, I was handed a robe the color of chewed bubblegum.
It’s 8:34 a.m. and I awaken to the pitter patter of rain on my window. “Guess it’s time to put those rain pants to good use,” I think. They’re nothing special—just a kid’s large from Amazon that provide the same fit and utility I’d get from an adult small, but for $10 less.
College presidents are a special kind of celebrity. They’re probably not the kind you’d stop to take a picture with, but whether or not we realize it, many of Bowdoin’s presidents’ names are ubiquitous on campus.
Forgive me Thorne Food Waste Owl, for I have sinned: most mornings, I pick the strawberries out of the fruit salad bowl. I’m not the only culprit; most people don’t want pineapple on their oatmeal or in their cereal, so they carefully collect slices of strawberries from the top of the fruit salad instead.
Around the bar at Moderation Brewing on the first Friday in March, 10 students and 10 professors discussed the purpose of American colleges. The group, formally titled the Concordia Forum, had departed from the couches in the Massachusetts Hall Faculty Room and walked to Moderation Brewing to continue their conversation, which lasted for over two hours.
This Tuesday, members of the newly formed Multiracial Student Union (MRSU) crowded into a dining room in Moulton Union. Although club leaders Ayana Harscoet ’21 and Flora Hamilton ’21 came prepared with a list of discussion points, the group dwelled on one question for the entire hour: “When did you first realize you were mixed race?” for the entire hour.
“Y el muro … ¿funcionará?” “And the wall… will it work?” asks an older man, who is kind and usually smiling but now looks concerned. He has dark skin, wrinkles around his eyes and a t-shirt torn at the sleeves.
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was a fresh wound in American public memory, and white institutions across the country were beginning to confront major gaps in their course offerings and their woefully homogenous student bodies.
When women were first admitted to the College in 1971, they enthusiastically pushed their way into all aspects of campus life, especially the athletic arena. As former Athletic Director Ed Coombs said in an Orient article from 1979, “I don’t think we or any of these schools [that went co-ed] anticipated the type of sports these women would want to play.
The bear wasn’t supposed to be there. It was just a black one, a mother whose deep eyes held ours for too long—so long that we continued to lock eyes, paralyzed, our weary knees locked by both reverence and fright.
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.
This past Saturday, customers of all ages buzzed in and out of the trademark Brunswick store, Gulf of Maine Books, at its 40th anniversary celebration and sale. The Maine Street store has drawn readers and writers to Brunswick, from local high schoolers to best selling authors.
The Merciless Debate Society, an unofficial discussion group based in Coles Tower, is dedicated to President Clayton Rose’s often-mentioned principle of “intellectual fearlessness.” The students of this group hope to “mercilessly” confront and debate topics that they believe are often ignored on campus.
Brunswick is home to many cafes, coffee shops, stores and a variety of well-liked restaurants. As for upscale dining, selection has been slim—until now. Odd Duck, which opened January 1, prides itself on filling this niche.
As you move towards the private rooms in Thorne Hall during dinner on any given night, you may be able to catch the sounds of an unfamiliar language. From Spanish to Hebrew, dinnertime language tables provide students with an opportunity to practice their native tongue or develop skills learned in the classroom.
A young boy, yarmulke on head and Kiddush cup in hand, tentatively sips Manischewitz wine on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah. It’s his first taste of wine. He’s relieved to find its saccharine taste familiar, not too different from grape juice.
On Tuesday evenings, the pink-lit walls of the basement that houses WBOR hold chatter that will never run on air: hypotheses on Marx, utopian visions of a socialist society and opinions on where Kamala Harris falls on the political spectrum.
“Yes, I was there for the earthquake … Yes, I felt it … crazy, humbling.” These words always seem to shake my listeners more than the earthquake shook me. Words have that effect. I was in the mountains of Mardi Himal on April 25, 2015 when a 7.8-magniude earthquake shook Nepal.
Recently, I’ve spent a lot of my free time knitting and thinking about making. I grew up with crafting, making creative objects as a part of my daily life. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have my own fabric basket, craft box and knitting needles.
We were squatting on the edge of the waterfront, warm brown waves lapping at our sand-speckled limbs. Oil rigs winked in the distance, the roar of a Confederate flag-adorned pickup truck occasionally punctuating the lazy ocean breeze.
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?
The Orient’s “50 things to do before you graduate” reads: “6. ‘Win’ dinner—be the last to leave.” Come graduation, most students can brag about having won Moulton or Thorne at least once. But the ultimate winner of Bowdoin Dining is John Parker, who has been working for the College for the past 35 years.
Bowdoin has no shortage of notable alumni to boast about. Yet unless you’re a physicist or engineer, you might not have heard of Edwin Hall, Bowdoin Class of 1875. Hall was born in Gorham, Maine on November 7, 1855, and grew up in the area, ultimately attending the College and continuing on to make enormous strides in his respective field of physics that altered the course of fields such as engineering and technology entirely.
“Work in the state you love” was the tagline of this week’s Maine Employer Career Fair, which brings employees from across the Pine Tree State to campus. For Bowdoin students, that state might be the one they grew up in or one they had never seen before arriving on campus.
This year, the English department brought new and now internationally-award-winning talent to its faculty. Author and Assistant Professor of English Alex Marzano-Lesnevich recently won the prestigious France Inter-JDD foreign book prize for the French translation of their 2017 cross-genre book “The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir.” This award is given by a committee of prominent French journalists to one book internationally per year in any genre.
We’re from Texas. Houston and Austin, respectively. At first, this didn’t seem to matter much. We both come from transplant families, families who found Texas by accident—or kismet—depending on which way you look at it. The more we talked, the more we fell back on this shared upbringing in order to make sense of who we are: two ethnically ambiguous, romantically adrift young women in Donald Trump’s America.
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.
In its first of three book launches this semester, the Bowdoin library hosted Associate Professor of English Maggie Solberg on Thursday to present her new book, “Virgin Whore,” a study of literary representations of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality in late medieval culture.
Rachel Connelly, Bion R. Cram professor of economics, and her family have what she describes as “a long-term love affair with China.” So when her oldest son, Martin Connelly, graduated from Colby in 2008 and suggested that the family start a Chinese tea company, it seemed only natural.
Although dating culture is dead at Bowdoin, food culture is immortal. By the time students graduate, they have attended four Lobster Bakes, eaten 256 Bowdoin Brunches and drained 150 PolarPoints far too quickly each semester. Thanks to the fantastic Bowdoin Dining staff, we’ve feasted on goat cheese paninis, seafood scampi and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, while our peers at other colleges, as Malcolm Gladwell is quick to mention, either suffer through four years of greasy pizza or abandon meal plans and school dining hall culture entirely.
While the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) is well-known for its extensive and unique collections, much of the space’s success and innovation is due to its employees. Anne and Frank Goodyear, co-directors of the BCMA since 2014, have played a significant role in facilitating the museum’s growth and creative aspirations.
While Bowdoin students travel all over the globe during breaks, each year a few students embark on scholarly expeditions as an extension of their senior honors projects. Through the College’s various research grants, students conduct research in cities across the world.
“I want to briefly share a few thoughts on my mind lately. Though I’m far from religious, I have an indelible tie to my Jewish heritage. My grandfather, Michael Schafir, was a Holocaust survivor. He spent five and half years in various forced labor and concentration camps throughout Poland and Germany.
I am not a generally happy person. This is not a new revelation (nor is it news, I’m sure, to any of my friends), but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I like to say that my “resting emotion” is anger.
While neo-Nazism may have entered the vernacular of today’s political discourse, Sophie al Mutawaly ’19 saw earlier this year that even the Hitler era hasn’t quite come to a close. A German citizen, al Mutawaly spent this past summer as a legal intern at the law firm Rückel & Collegen in Munich.
A few nights ago, overcome with stress about school, family and personal relationships, I sat on the steps of the Museum of Art late at night. It was one of those perfectly cold evenings, when the wind whips your face and bites at your hands.
The wreaths around campus signal two important things for Bowdoin: winter break approaches and finals draw ever nearer. For some, the holiday season may come with little spiritual connection, perhaps just a red Starbucks cup of coffee, but for others, the holidays start earlier and have significant meaning for their faith.
Rowdy passengers, grueling layovers and long car rides: all of these mark the experiences of students traveling home. As finals week approaches and students anticipate the beginning of winter break, they must also consider plans to return home and address the varying levels of time and complication it takes to do so.
Students in the Visual Arts Department pin, hang and place their art in the Edwards Center for Art and Dance. For these students, this show is their final; the culmination of months of hard work. Drawings, paintings, sculpture and much more will fill the walls.
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?
There is no single leader of the Stowe Writers House, a new writing collective on Bowdoin’s campus. It is a purely collaborative space, devoid of hierarchy, deadlines and judgement. Loosely modelled off of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, the Stowe Writers House group was conceived last year through a collaboration between students and Professor of Africana Studies and English Tess Chakkalakal.
Oftentimes, I forget things. I forget my OneCard, my lab notebook or I forget about the banana that I put in my backpack a week ago. But I never forget to put on my raincoat on Tuesdays.
I’ve always been a homebody. I grew up in Falmouth, Maine and coincidentally decided to go to school just thirty minutes up the road in Brunswick. To some folks, my college decision seemed crazy. Why go to school so close?
Oysters need time, movement and a little TLC, says Jordi St. John. Otherwise, their speckled shells clench up, congeal, lose the space they need to make a home. Carrying a brush and a sure grin, he runs fine bristles along the plastic bags where shellfish grow, brushing specks of algae that fall into the waves surrounding Merritt Island.
I felt the least American in the spring of my senior year of high school. It was early 2016 and we talked about Trump at least once in every class I had. My school was very divided.
What do beer and politics have in common? A lot, according to Mattie Daughtry, co-founder of Moderation Brewing Company on Maine Street, which opened last March. And Daughtry would know. Aside from running Moderation with business partner Philip Welsh, Daughtry works as a Democratic member of the Maine State House of Representatives.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane—oh, wait, it is a plane! Teddy Wecker ’22 flies above Bowdoin in a Piper Cherokee. The first-year finished his pilot’s license a few weeks before coming to the College. For him, flying in Maine is a dream.
Most regulars are hesitant to discuss the hidden gem, the Visual Art Center (VAC), because part of the building’s appeal is its serenity and relative obscurity. The students who frequent the space are well acquainted with one another, as there is a small but devoted group that studies regularly between the glass walls, bookshelves and quirky posters that line the inside.
When Shankar Mahadevan hits the chorus of the iconic Bollywood ballad “Desi Girl,” impassioned drums and raucous claps fade into the titular line that’s captivated South Asian families and popular media for the past decade: “Dekhi Lakh Lakh Pardesi Girl / Ain’t Nobody Like My Desi Girl / Sab Toh Soni N Saadi Desi Girl.” Translation: We’ve seen millions of foreign girls, but ain’t nobody like my Desi girl / The most beautiful and down-to-earth girl is an Indian girl.
Would you choose to be immortal? I think it’s fair to generalize that everyone has pondered immortality at some point in their lives. Maybe you watched “Twilight” for the first time and wondered what it would be like to stay a teenager forever.
I thought that I wouldn’t think about suicide anymore if I got into Bowdoin. All this high school stuff was to be left in the past, and I would be a better, less jaded, more upbeat person.
When she was a high school senior visiting Bowdoin as a swimming recruit, it was an OutPeers and OutAllies list in an Osher dorm that made Kat Gaburo ’19 feel confident that the team she would soon join would be a welcoming place.
“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.
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.
This past February, during my sophomore spring semester, I decided I wasn’t going to study abroad. Ever since arriving at Bowdoin, studying away for a semester had been on my mind. I’d cycled through a lot of possibilities: minor or major in Spanish and go to Spain or South America, take a semester of Italian and go to Italy, take a biology class and go to Tanzania, take a semester of Greek and do the College Year in Athens.
To Rose Warren ’21, there is an obvious need at Bowdoin for more student discussion of mental health. Three weeks ago, she received an official charter from the Student Organizations Oversight Committee to found the Mental Health Club.
Computational creativity can seem—at first—like an oxymoron. Computer science is often associated with dark rooms and daunting technology while creativity connotes vivid color, energy and novelty. In the case of Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sarah Harmon’s new Computational Creativity course, however, this dichotomy could not be further from the truth.
I first visited Adams Hall on a quest to find my own white whale: the perfect Bowdoin study space. Convinced that the right location was all I needed to reach peak productivity, I found myself, dripping wet, on the stairway leading to the fourth floor one rainy afternoon.
Not all students imagine confetti-shooting cannons as they arrive on a plane for their first year at college. For Antonio Watson ’12, those cannons also contained sunshine and glitter. Watson lives his life with the goal to explore his authentic identity.
Enduring the contempt of strangers can be emotionally draining. And contempt is, unsurprisingly, the primary impulse of those whose doors are knocked on when they’re eating dinner with their family, or when their newborn child has just fallen asleep, or they’re just about to dash off to the airport to catch a plane or when they’re already running late and a bright-faced, sweaty, idealistic kid shows up at their door telling them about the plight of sea turtles or the midterm elections.
Flashing lights, flocks of ill-tempered travelers, the symphony of yelling intermixed with cars honking—I was instantly shrouded in the familiar temperament of the city as I stepped outside the arrival hall. Within a matter of minutes, thanks to being a seasoned veteran of John.
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.
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.
Director of Religious and Spiritual Life at Bowdoin Eduardo Pazos Palma believes the study of religious traditions can help with understanding many issues that grip the increasingly globalized world. Pazos Palma wants to initiate this conversation with a new Multifaith Program at Bowdoin.
Along Bath Road, just a little ways down from Pine Street Apartments, sit Cameron’s Lobster House and a State Farm Insurance office. Next door is an unassuming white-paneled building with a purple door, on which a piece of paper is taped to the glass.
