A few weeks ago, police officers shut down a harmless student organised “Harlem Shake,” which took place in front of Gorgas Library steps after barely five minutes of action. This Wednesday, as I walked...
Repetition is a natural human need. We crave routine and the perfection of a circle. We live our lives in a series of cycles and end up exactly where we began. There seems to me a certain idea behind repeating...
My next all-American holiday experience, spring break, couldn’t come quick enough. To avoid the hoards of string bikinis and beer-loaded pick-ups heading to the beach, I decided to exchange the past...
As the carpet of the academic year begins to roll further and further to an end, I have been speaking to quite a few students about their plans for the coming summer and fall semesters. Many students seem...
After spending most of the weekend curled up in the fetal position watching Jean Luc Godard’s film collection and questioning the meaning of solitude and love, I had a sudden thought. It’s time to...
On one of my regular tea breaks this week, I stumbled across an interesting BBC Radio 4 program. The familiar voices were weighing the benefits of gaining practical experience alongside degree courses....
A recent surge in online lectures, learning material and degree programs has shed light on the effect that computers have on education. Of course, online content is one means of a higher level of equality...
Nothing quite compares to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival experience. And it is just that, an experience. The streets are full of characters, the pavement becomes a circus, and the cafes and restaurants...
“They are the men who are not brought up but are obliged to come up.” These are the words Frederick Douglass used to describe the age-old archetype of America’s “self-made man.” The lone figure,...
Last weekend marked yet another historic day in America’s ever-filling calendar of commemorations and public holidays. A calendar that, if one isn’t too careful, will leave no time for reflection and...
Over a New Year’s dinner with friends in Glasgow, I sat at one side of the table facing a line of my nearest and dearest as they began to look and sound more and more like a rather serious board of directors....
So it’s been four months, however many days and nights. I’m not a numbers woman. And I’ve lost track of time. Sleep in my life has moved through stages. When I was little, it was an obligation. I...
Thanksgiving came and campus became an eerie, empty shell. There was no line for coffee, the Quad looked more like a private lawn hostile to trespassers, and I could actually cross the street without being...
The British have an obsession with the weather. I remember the six o’clock news at my grandparents’ house. It would be a family affair, all of us sprawled out in front of the television, waiting for...
Sitting in the library café was Ray Mundo, a fellow international student from Bavaria, Germany. His large frame towered over my notebook. “Rowers do more before 8 a.m. than most people do all day,”...
So there it was, the big “E.” We’ve all spent the past few weeks dreaming in red and blue, our ears abused with endless commercials and rhetoric and now, finally, we have chosen the next president...
Waiting in line for coffee is a student ritual. No matter how many people are in front of you, caffeine is more important than worrying about lost time. And this has become such an integrated part of...
In 2009, the Republican Party blocked a proposal for a cap-and-trade approach to carbon emissions. This would mean that CO2 emissions would be capped, and any company wanting to exceed the cap could buy...
I ran out of English tea bags this week. I suffered a moment of distress and trauma as I stared into the empty packet. It was Yorkshire tea, my local brew. The sides of the packaging are covered in pictures...
Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” With midterms rearing their ugly heads, my head is swimming in quotations. Yet, America has felt more...
As I sat bleary-eyed in a hostel in New Orleans, I listened to two French men tell me how they had sneaked into a hotel room on the top floor to see the sunrise. Only when the bartender became suspicious...
After reading an article in the New York Times entitled “Last Call for College Bars,” I was struck by the closing gap in the differences between British and American night life. Courtney Rubin, the...
I spent the weekend trailing in Sipsey with the Outdoor Recreation Center. Hiking, or what I called “trailing” back home – feeling the weight of simplicity on your back and placing all your trust...
A strange thing happened to me a few weeks ago, a sort of baptism if you like. I was born into the Deep South by swimming in the Black Warrior River. It wasn’t the sort of spot made for swimming and,...
As I sat in the concrete theme park, staring into the disappointment of cheese sauce, I thought I had slipped from this reality into a television show. I found myself day-dreaming of the years I’d given...
I had planned to pick apart the dark side of American consumerism which I have lately experienced, however, as I wolfed down my Lucky Charms this morning, satisfied by the novelty of it all, I read something...
I had so many ideas of America before I arrived here. To me, it had almost become a caricature of itself – an untouchable one, at that. After endless stock portrayals in films, TV shows and literature,...
