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“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.
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.
Rain drips outside, and the warm wood interior of the Roux Center for the Environment has a kind of hearth-like warmth. It’s Thursday morning, the day of the building’s dedication. I’m not here for class or for office hours, just to sit in the space and to look.
Wish yourself into the eye of a hurricane. Search for your home in the sea of red pixels at the center of the storm. See the national news anchor stand where you and your friends took prom pictures; hear him say the coming night will smash it to pieces.
Between Sills and Searles, there exists an exceedingly large population of squirrels. They hang on tree branches and scurry in bushes, but largely, they romp around freely in the open grass. While the squirrels most frequently travel alone, they occasionally appear en masse and sometimes are seen in hot pursuit of other fellow squirrels.
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?
Lorenzo Meigs ’21 has lived in the same city for practically all of his life. I’ve always been fascinated by my peers’ relationships to place, especially by those who seem to embody their homes. Meigs is one of those people.
Every Tuesday and Friday, from May 1 until November 20, local farmers set up shop on the Brunswick mall along Maine Street to share the fruits of their harvest with the Brunswick community. It’s unusual to find a Maine city or town without a local farmers’ market, so what sets this particular market apart?
After noticing her accent, the first question Bostonians often ask Director of Writing and Rhetoric Meredith McCarroll, is where she is from. When she answers the South, her new acquaintance responds, usually in an exaggerated southern drawl, “Where in the South?” to which she says, “In the mountains of North Carolina,” more commonly known as Appalachia.
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.
This place holds secrets. I remember going outside in the early morning fog to be greeted with deafening silence from the cicadas who had stayed up all night buzzing. I remember staring out the car window for hours at sizzling gravel roads, wondering what horrors the rocks had seen.
“You aren’t immortal. Your time is limited and precious,” my mom constantly tells me. It’s not as if she gives this advice to deter me from doing the things I love—or even from pursuing life-threatening endeavors.
When President Barack Obama emerged from his post-tenure elusiveness to give a speech at the University of Illinois, he was accepting an award named after a Bowdoin alum. The Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government is named in recognition of a distinguished economist who graduated from the College in 1913.
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.
You’d never guess it from looking at him now—sitting comfortably, a smile spreading across his face as he describes his orchestra, voice bouncing and echoing across the recital hall—but George Lopez, Beckwith artist-in-residence and director of the Bowdoin orchestra, never wanted to be a musician.
Ladd House—occupied by sophomores in recent memory—has a new set of residents: class of 2019. As the only exclusively senior space within the College House system, the iconic red facade of Ladd now represents an experiment in keeping the social scene for upperclassmen centered on campus.
Almost one year ago, I wrote a Talk of the Quad titled “Dirigo” about the constant movement during my childhood and the freedom I felt when I put roots down in Maine. I’ll say now, it was naive of me to think that after years of movement, I thought I would suddenly and poetically find my home.
When he permanently leaves Brunswick in a few months, Adam Berliner ’13 will do so in a small, yellow school bus. No longer used to transport students but to support a life on the road, the bus will be Berliner’s home for the near future.
Monday through Saturday, you can usually find reruns of Seinfeld playing at 90 Union Street, home to Brunswick’s new (as of last spring) cafe, Dog Bar Jim. That is, when it’s not 85 degrees out and you arrive to find a sticky note that reads, “Too hot for Seinfeld,” on the vintage TV that rests near the cash register.
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.
My toes balance on the slotted, concrete boat launch, and the water around my ankles is cold. I walk forward, and the water makes itself known higher and higher on my body. Goosebumps coat my skin: I know I must dive in and that it will be warmer once I’m submerged.
Growing up, my anxiety was like a cloud. Always there, mostly invisible to others, making everything a little bit more grey. For many years, I thought that everyone had one. I had always been taught that my brain was my most valuable possession.
Four floors of evenly-spaced windows tower over the Androscoggin River. The faded brick structure stands firm, bookending Maine Street just before Topsham. Though unassuming from the exterior, Fort Andross is a place bustling with motion – hundreds of individuals enter and exit every day, each with a unique purpose.
For many, Cumberland Self Storage signifies transition: a temporary place to store belongings. But for the past 11 years, Manager Steve Howe has been a constant friendly face to greet and help customers. “A lot of people think it’s dull and boring—you just sit on your butt all day long and don’t do anything—but that’s not the case.
Every Saturday from November to May, vendors selling goods from freshly-harvested mushrooms to homemade body lotions shuffle in to fill the first floor of Fort Andross with their colorful stalls. This is the Brunswick Winter Market, where the vendors are as eclectic and versatile as they are passionate about their craft—whether it is cheese- and butter-making, coffee roasting or knife sharpening.
Next door to the Winter Market is the Waterfront Flea Market. In fact, customers have to walk past the flea market to get to the winter market. A lot of people pause before the flea market, look, a bit confused and intrigued, at the couple of mismatched chairs out front, but many just continue to the other market.
John Bisbee has exclusively welded nails for the past 32 years. “I thought it was just a little phase, and it wasn’t,” said the artist in his riverside Fort Andross workshop, where he has worked since 1996.
