The Wall Street Journal ran a “Culture” article on Aug. 22 entitled “Not So Fast,” and subtitled “Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication.” The article captured a subtext pervasive in today’s technological climate: The frantic communication that e-mail and iPhones allow us is a hindrance to [...]

The conventional wisdom (or something I just came up with the other day—not sure which) is that college (we actually don’t really talk about the relevance of high school anymore—sorry) is your four years to figure out “who” you are, and then the rest of your life is focused around “what” you do. I think [...]

In my opinion, a major fault in the world is the unwillingness or inability to recognize the underlying values of one’s actions or beliefs. I will demonstrate this fault with examples from Washington University in St. Louis. Case number one: You want to recycle that water bottle you are drinking. Why? Because it is good to do so. That is likely as far as you get.

“Fetishize,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, means “to make a fetish of.” A “fetish,” then, is (besides a magical object associated with shamanistic religious practices and an object or body part that arouses remarkable sexual desire) “an object of unreasonably excessive attention or reverence” or “an abnormally obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a [...]

I feel it necessary to comment on the “-isms” and “-ities” sculpture show that Wash. U. art students put on Friday down in an obscure warehouse in downtown St. Louis because it remarkably disturbed me. You come to the occasional event as a human being that takes you to the limits of a concept which [...]

At the “Shattering Ceilings: Celebrating Success in Pursuit of the Dream” ceremony in Graham Chapel this Monday, held to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at Washington University, I felt a sense of alienation and of absurdity for the first half of the precedings. The cover of the event’s program sported a photograph of Martin [...]

My friends give me a lot of grief for being a humanities major. According to one of them, my major’s acronym—“IPH”—stands for the same thing that the letters “B.S.” do. Strange. Sometimes, of course, I feel the need to defend myself. Last night at Noodles & Co. was one of those nights. I scoffed at [...]

I encountered a lot of people this Thanksgiving break who said that I was young, that I had the luxury of screwing around for a few years, that what I do for a job now doesn’t have to be the only thing I ever do. I told those people, “You have no idea.” Because they didn’t. They were adults.

Me, four years ago—St. Xavier High School, Cincinnati, Ohio. A Friday night. Future state football champs playing their guts out on the field in front of me. Screaming, cheering, blue-clad St. X students all around me. Us cheering across to the visitors’ stands: “Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”

I talked to my good friend Tyler this weekend. He goes to Yale. He is a repository of continually-renewing ideas and distinctions that, just for being in his mind, make the world a better place. He kept a notebook of ideas since the end of the summer. When he has an idea, he will write [...]