Tuesday night, President Barack Obama delivered a stirring State of the Union address. One of the most stirring and important parts of the address called for drastic changes in the American educational system.

Last week, an editorial was semi-anonymously published in The Economist by an author named M.C.K. and attacked “the real wrongdoers [who] were not those who sold risky products at inflated prices but the dupes who bought them.

[media-credit name="Alex Chiu" align="alignleft" width="300"][/media-credit] Monday, Jan. 21, 2013, marked the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second and final term.

A Friday night at Wash U. We all know the signs. The inebriated underclassmen staggering around the Swamp on their way to Frat Row, having consumed far too much alcohol in far too short of a time. They pack their way onto the Campus Circulator in order to shorten the journey by a few minutes and stumble off to try to get into either this house or that.

A few days ago happened to be April 20. No matter how secluded anyone is, after coming to college they certainly know about so-called “National Pot Day.” Marijuana culture in college is pervasive; even those who don’t actively participate or never have participated are nonetheless informed about certain well-known aspects of it.

This month, the Department of Justice brought an antitrust lawsuit against Apple along with many book publishers, alleging price fixing in order to combat Amazon’s successful strategy of dramatically reducing e-book prices.

Last month, James Cameron (yes, the same man who directed “Avatar” and “Titanic”) reached the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest part of any ocean on Earth. Under almost seven miles of water, his ship, the Deepsea Challenger, had to withstand arguably the most inhospitable conditions on Earth, with pressure equivalent to almost 264 times that on Earth’s surface.

Recently, Stephanie Eisner, a cartoonist for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at University of Texas at Austin, was forced to leave the staff over a cartoon that editorialized the Trayvon Martin case.

I’m sure many people have had experiences with massively multiplayer online games and their unique ability to collect large numbers of gamers into a somewhat cohesive environment. What I find particularly intriguing, however, is how such games can be used to study human social interaction in a way that would be otherwise impossible.

Textbooks. Every time a new semester rolls around, it’s time to get a new stack of them. Textbooks are the bane of students, being oversized, expensive lumps that burn a hole through our wallets. Often, professors don’t even use these books, except for homework problems, leading to what students view as a gigantic waste of money.