Build the NYC mosque
On August 3, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Society voted unanimously not to extend landmark status to 45–47 Park Place, formerly a Burlington Coat Factory, now a partially-damaged warehouse. As far as municipal law goes, the decision was as mundane and routine as handing out a parking ticket or issuing a liquor license — the warehouse, with its commonplace architectural style, simply did not offer a compelling justification for landmark status. And yet to hear many conservatives talk about the matter, it seems as if the Landmarks Preservation Society has dealt a death blow to the American way of life. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claims that it will “encourage [radical Islamists] in their challenge to our civilization,” and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl writes that it will “risk giving militant Islamists a victory to exploit.”
Radically bitter tea
The tea party movement has come a long way since its inception. Emerging in 2009 as a reaction to bank bailouts and the looming health care reform, the movement originally appeared to be a highly localized and disorganized group angry with the increasing size, power, and spending of the federal government. They seemed to resuscitate the ghost of the old “states-righters” around the time of the Civil War. Due to the extremely localized nature of the movement, many believed that the party would quickly disintegrate. Unfortunately, they were wrong — instead of falling apart, it has mutated into a virus that is taking hold of many voters and Republican politicians throughout this country.
Tyranny of the majority in France
Legislation banning face veils from public, passed by the lower house of the French Parliament, is a sadly misguided attempt to maintain national identity. In reality, it promotes only xenophobia and religious discrimination.
Getting lost in <br />freshman advising
As the fall semester approaches and MIT’s Class of 2014 arrives, I feel obligated to discuss an issue that affected my experience as a freshman. The Institute can boast of an exemplary faculty, course selection, and student body. However, MIT’s freshmen advising program has not been impressive. In contrast to most schools, MIT offers freshmen the ability to choose between group and individual advising. Residence-based Advising (RBA) and Freshmen Seminar Advising (FSA) place students with a group of their peers and MIT faculty members, while Traditional Advising focuses on individual meetings with a specific faculty adviser. Whereas most schools assign hundreds of students to a few specialized counselors, MIT advisers are largely drawn from the normal faculty.
Free speech requires responsibility
Keith Yost misses the point in his column “Muhammad in a bear costume,” a thoroughly confused ramble that disguises prejudice in the guise of apparently reasoned discourse. He states up front that “I am not calling for offending for offense’s sake there is a reasonable argument to be had that responsible institutions should take measures, including self-censorship, to avoid inspiring animosity between Islam and the West.”
Check your intellectual freedom <br />at the door
In 1858, a relatively obscure lawyer named Abraham Lincoln ran for a U.S. Senate seat against Stephen A. Douglas, at that time the most powerful senator in the country. The two candidates agreed to a series of seven (seven!) three-hour-long (three hours!) public debates on slavery, each to be held in a different congressional district of Illinois. Although Lincoln lost the election, the debates and the publication of their transcripts brought him to national attention, and two years later propelled him to becoming the 16th president of the United States.
OPEN LETTER In preparation for MIT’s new campus centennial, <br />a modest proposal to Hockfield
<i>The following petition was sent to President Susan J. Hockfield on June 25, 2010.</i>
Muhammad in a bear costume
On November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director, author, and father, was shot and killed by Mohammed Bouyeri as van Gogh rode his bicycle to work. In the open air of the streets of Amsterdam, Bouyeri shot van Gogh eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then finished by stabbing two knives into his chest, pinning there a 5-page manifesto threatening the lives of others, including a prominent Dutch politician.
The freshman experience
I remember falling asleep that first night after moving into my room. Music blasted somewhere in the distance, cars zoomed by across the river, and voices shouted and laughed outside as people walked by MacGregor House. It was a sharp contrast to what I was used to. Having grown up in Uxbridge, MA, a small town of 13,000, I was accustomed to far more natural sounds: the rustling of leaves as the wind swept through them. The chirping of crickets amid the buzzing of other insects. The gentle pattering of rain on the roof.
Where will you go from here?
In 1970, an American agronomist named Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize. His research on improving crop yields, a central component to what is commonly called the “Green Revolution,” has been credited with saving as many as a billion lives. If this estimate is an exaggeration, it is not a large one — at the time of Borlaug’s effort, the conventional wisdom of pundits, epitomized by Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” was that without significant population control, mankind was on its way to mass starvation. Though he achieved little fame or monetary reward, Borlaug may be the greatest humanitarian of all time.
Process is key for dining
For all undergraduates, including the majority who don’t live in dining hall dorms and have no direct stake in the costs of meal plans, MIT’s house dining program impacts more than just how they eat; it impacts their cultures, friends, and social habits. Changing house dining, a financial necessity, will alter or eliminate some long cherished traditions and replace them with new, potentially better ones.
Life in the cement bunker
Over the course of four years at MIT, I’ve come to realize the meaning of IHTFP. I distinctly remember the senses of anguish: the smell of a blown op-amp at 2AM, feeling powerless when MIT cut eight varsity sports, the taste of another Red Bull while trying to finish that computational biology project, and listening to the collective groan of freshmen getting back their physics exams. The visions of paradise are even more vivid: watching our professor race to erase multivariable calculus equations in 10-250 before the boards could reset, observing a unanimous vote of the faculty to approve an experiment that could bring together the fall career fair and the September student holiday, and seeing it start to snow right before my first crew regatta. During the weeks since class ended, I’ve found myself thinking about how unique some of these experiences are to MIT and identifying the common thread behind them: our community and its insistence on the freedom to explore.
HDAG is failing to keep students informed
A new link to “minutes” from the House Dining Advisory Group meetings was posted on the House Dining Review website last week. The document communicates frustratingly little concrete information and highlights the extent to which HDAG has failed to deliver on its promise of transparency and student engagement.
Tall tales, tamed truth How shifting baselines turn the past into myth
Last week, my dad and I had yet another conversation about privacy. It makes him nervous to consider what gets broadcast where and stored away by whom on the World Wide Web. Chances are, your parents feel similarly about the explosion of tell-all networking sites and one-click shopping pages that save your credit card info and life history details. Meanwhile, many of us don’t bat an eye when asked to supply birth dates and cell phone numbers, while a string of relationship dramas play out across our Facebook walls.
Israel Innovation Week is just Israeli public relations MIT should not support Israel’s attempts to polish its image.
Science and technology should be used to benefit humanity, not to destroy it. Sadly, MIT’s Global Education and Career Development Center (GECDC) betrayed this principle this past weekend when it co-sponsored a weekend of exhibits, presentations and events billed as “Israeli Innovation — Healing the World through Technology” at the Museum of Science. Israeli Innovation Weekend (IIW) was co-sponsored by the Consulate-General of the State of Israel to New England, which is also one of the events top donors; nearly half of IIW’s steering committee is made up of consulate staff.
A new problem for a new age
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made the case to an audience of MIT students and faculty that technological distractions in the car constitute an “epidemic” — each year, 6,000 people die because someone was texting or making a call while on the road. And Secretary LaHood is right. Distracted driving is a problem. But the Department of Transportation’s plan to tackle this challenge in the same way they taught us to wear seat belts and not drive drunk might have some problems of its own.
Three simple steps to group project success
Group. Project. These are possibly two of the most dreaded words to an MIT student, inducing fears of getting stuck with the slacker partner or pulling an all-nighter to throw together a half-effort project. At least, this is how those two words make me feel. So when I heard that I would be working on not one but <i>three</i> group projects in my classes this semester, I was dismayed, to say the least.
Bringing MIT technology to the world
MIT announced this week that it would be assisting neglected disease research by putting its patents into a patent pool sponsored by pharmaceutical company GSK for use by neglected disease researchers around the world.
The goals of Palestine Awareness Week
In very few ways does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “resemble domestically sticky political conflicts in the United States.” Still, people would have you believe otherwise. People would have you believe that the conflict is merely a squabble over land, with hardheaded opponents on each side, or a poorly managed government soiling an otherwise unanimous peace. Most people know how difficult it can be to get steadfast opponents to agree on anything. So, is this the case here?