Joe Paterno died on Sunday morning. There is a chance, however, that you heard about it on Saturday night, when many news organizations reported that Paterno had died many hours before he actually did. The original report came from Onward State, Pennsylvania State University’s independent student news blog, which tweeted the erroneous information.

Washington University officials are working to fill the position of Vice Chancellor of Public Affairs. The position was vacated at the end of September when Fred Volkmann retired after working at the University for 31 years. Volkmann sent an email to select members of the community on January 10, 2010 announcing his decision to retire on September 30, 2011.

Our generation has created a consumption paradox. We are consuming more than ever before yet are paying less for it. To college students, this means heavier pockets and greater access to perhaps otherwise inaccessible products.

Amid the flurry of outraged status updates, in-class rants and circulating petitions, something has become abundantly clear. The student body is upset that $20,000 of their Student Activity fee had been slated to fund a panel including Bristol Palin—a young woman who gained recognition based on the fateful timing of her teenage pregnancy, which happened to coincide with her mother’s vice presidential candidacy.

The kind of people who read an article and are moved to respond in an online comment probably feel more strongly about the issue addressed in the article than those who read it and move on, or than those who don’t read it at all. Video interviews have a higher chance of capturing the latter two types.

As we mark the eighth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, our country is embarking on a high-stakes debate about whether and how to continue waging this war.

To my knowledge, never before in American history has such an important and long-lasting war received so little public attention. It is true that we have had many substantial distractions—the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, our energy problems, the economic crisis, the health care debate—that all deserve our attention; yet, we should not have let this war fall so deeply out of our public consciousness.

Anyone who has logged onto the Internet, scrolled TV channels searching for a good show or even browsed the magazine aisle at Borders is aware of the simple fact that fashion has invaded all forms of media. Oftentimes you see blogs about what the celebs are wearing, runway photos from New York Fashion Week, the [...]

A great historian once told me that she enjoys her job because she “likes to read other peoples’ mail.” As a dedicated scholar of history in the midst of writing an honors thesis, I couldn’t agree more. There is no greater anticipation than carefully opening a crinkly, yellowed envelope bearing someone else’s name. As a [...]

Last year, in all of the election fervor, you might have noticed a new acronym being thrown around the Internet if you were as connected to news sources and blogs as I was. The letters “MSM,” which stand for “Mainstream Media,” would appear like a golden siren, alerting me to the political orientation (not to [...]

As anyone who has been in an argument before knows, one of the most annoying tendencies one might encounter is a looseness with facts. People routinely distort or ignore inconvenient information that doesn’t support their case. Still, this tendency is often held in check to some degree by the unwillingness of persons with opposing positions [...]